Riding the Light –

Blog

  • O Florida!

    O Florida!

    I remember that pale sky of autumn when the sound du jour was rattle of leaves. Not happening here. I figure FL should be the “clammy state” & not just for marine life. 

    Things are resettling at work. Now it’s a drill & somewhat of a bore, but I have time to do other projects of organization, must must prioritize & sort. Place was a total morass of files & is about half a morass. Heh heh.

    Slept well after watching a very complicated Chinese soap opera. Boy, those royals are a drain on the economy. 

    Woke to sort the kitchen cabinet. My roommate brought home a ‘Ninja’ cooker to air fry. Guess she’s gonna air fry air since she eats nothing much needing cooking & does 90% of her cooking at her work where the fridge bulges & you can only work with the first thing on the shelf cuz every square thought of an inch is occupied by 3 jars with a teaspoon of something protein in each. She has cooked, um, 3x since I’ve been here except for two batches of vegan potato salad for picnics. The interesting thing about vegan food is no one eats it but vegans. I know, don’t mock, but once you mark it “vegan”, it is safe from being eaten. We leave with this much & come home with two tablespoons missing from the dish & enough vegan potato salad for 3 weeks if anyone ate it. Christ, it was boring when prepared, after 3 weeks, Beyond Burger additions do not help.

    I plunged into Detwilers yesterday looking for berries, but tired of strawbs & blues were priced to where the zeros wrapped around the containers. So I got other stuff & this time I shopped their meats which are mostly from their own farms & of course not being commercial, taste funny. But hey, no taste. I can eat it! I saw a piece of steak – probably should not share – but it looked so good & I heard my body groan. So I came home with the perfect vegan onion (really?) & two chunks of extremely tender meat. Ate my old brown-edged onion so as not to disturb perfection & sliced a pepper in that, sliced the beef thin, Goodness, did I enjoy every bite. And then I found gorgeous jade-like Pesto to yum on.

    This morning I have bacon! And one quiche shell so will make a perfect quiche. I thoughtfully pushed some guy’s buggy along, as he watched me do so, got 3′ before realizing that wasn’t my cart. Neither of us was embarrassed, it’s Florida, you know? We kind of grinned, I kind of bowed my head & said something about being on the other side of the aisle, oops. Checked out at $112 with enough food to refill the fridge, move over all the veganish stored in the freezer (of which none has disappeared since I’ve been here as only the potatoes do). I seriously must make a menu to use the stuff up. I’ve got news, the only way to remember anything is to go shopping when you’re hungry.

    I indulge. 

    So realistic Friday has become Saturday & I am tingling with the thought of going to the flea market on Tuttle again. Must be Fall!! The yellow flags snap in the hot breeze, sun hats & ball caps are out, I have polished my new & lovely dark glasses & the lemonade stand is grinding away somewhere in the afternoon. Time to examine tiny treasure, thimbles, stem arms with minute hinges. O Lord, the bargains groaning on the tables! And there’s a flea happening over by work, too, at a church which could be New Old Treasure gleaned from whatever underground stasis room passes for a basement here. I might find … wait for it … an alligator head! 

    I ended the PO box yesterday. I guess I’m moved in. Home alone as roomie away in Ft. Myers bringing back the first mattress she ever truly loved, best in the entire known universe over which she has lusted over since spending the night at her friend’s home years agone. Not sure where the old one is going but perhaps there’s a corner at some flea market unfilled. 

    V., her office mate, don’t get me started – one of those “I love V. BUT” is how anything about V. starts, yeh? runs a floating storage unit, like some riverboat casino, you never know what you’ll find it it but guarandamteed if it’s supposed to be “right as you open the door” it will be in the darker recesses of the unit rubbing the Arkansas border, with four empty boxes, one birdcage, two litter pans & a baby gate slung in since the last time “up front” was a euphemism for accessible.

    The Ninja. Didn’t this start with a Ninja? Why name a cooking appliance after a cult of disreputable assassins? The Ninja is stored in the back of the bottom cabinet now. The 16 nesting bowls (one of which is used for vegan potato salad twice a year) are stacked off to one side, the knife holder is carefully facing away from the opening… the 47 plastic containers saved from every meal out since plastic became a viable takehome medium, are trash-bagged, well, recycle bagged. She made the (mistake?) statement “we’ll never use all those, might as well get rid of them” in my hearing. My radar heard “incoming!” & I found the single paper bag in the kitchen & filled it immediately with these. There is never enough Tupperware unless suddenly it is in a box of overflow for V’s storage unit. 

    No wonder the American world is awash.

    Ah well. Let’s keep rowing. I need to find room for the two bottles of soy & 3 cans of beans on my side of the cabinet. The day is always dangerous that begins with knocking the coffee filter off your cup at the edge between counters where all can run calmly down to unreached depths. Might be a basement down there? I think I heard an alligator gnawing coffee grounds. 

    love,

    c

  • The Fringe Element of Genius

    Genius is the real Breakaway Civilization. It’s not the place where the rubber meets the road, it’s the place where the tires leave it, fold up under the vehicle and you hear that Star Trek sound track as this fades into a streak of meteor. I never liked that piece of music. I remember once reading how someone thought “boldly go” was the name of the destination streaked to. I didn’t understand how such a cool show could have such a poor scant of music as a theme.

    I digress.

    Genius is the point of the lever where the world turns, tips, tilts. It is a scream in the psyche as an idea takes off or lands in the same nanosecond. It’s where nothing really matters besides being a human at the top of your game & realizing everyone else really IS following behind, dragging little red wheely suitcases. It’s an old golf joke – “hit the ball, drag Charlie.” And the sound track behind you is the one you associate with the monster coming closer, the limp-gimp of a simpering squeaky wheel sounding the inevitable.

    I am ready for change. It comes upon me suddenly, does change. It takes a breath that won’t release & chokes off the chance for future air. It tunnels vision, limits thinking until let go. It demands every scintilla of attention in an arc of trajectory that sucks the body after – grabbing mind & heart first. The rest must somehow catch up, blurring into elasticity, some cartoon of impossible Gumby proportions. It’s unexpected (to say the least). It sometimes never does reunite into a single being & part of me is left behind forever, a note hanging, an echo from a room away. The suspense is excrutiating. The relief of the end goal divine.

    I am finished with this job. It served me for a year. I helped it get on its feet, patted its little behind, tickled its curly scalp & now, with it barely standing, I realize I can take no more. It’s a job where they consciously reject change, deleting the better they can do to serve in favor for what has already proven trite. It scales down thinking & smashes any attempts to improve with sure, strong strokes like pummeling bread dough.

    I don’t have to fit any mold any more. I can wipe the webs from my face, I’ve made it through the darkling forest & into a clearing where nothing shows beyond the sky. This is the place where wings dance & possibility bubbles into its opposite number.

    I will watch them shrink into a distance as they fight hard to maintain small rather than mainline growth. When I move into this grace where the limitless opens a side to the ship’s skin, I will walk through & claim my own wild ride, turning in that ticket of a year in seatbelts for one deep breath.

    I will never exhale!

  • One By One

    One by one, the rituals remove

    My good deeds countered by my faults

    She cannot read my writing, this old friend

    To whom I wrote each week.

    “Will you type them?” she asked

    Innocently

    Not knowing that my fingers on a

    Keyboard do not say the same words

    As wrapped around a pen.

    Not knowing I choose not to do much

    Personal stuff at work

    Where everything personal becomes not so.

    I miss the tiny steadiness

    Of reaching for a pad

    Of buying stale cards at thrift stores

    Of watching the words emerge in ink.

    Thus both lose.

    I can no longer write her,

    She can no longer receive

    My epistles about funny stuff:

    Finding the plastic alligator head in the pool,

    Getting my foot stuck in a trash can like in the old cartoons.

    Soon she will say why don’t you write me? Are you okay?

    What shall I say?

    Bringing It On Home

    Few know how I pull apart my life

    Like making jerky, the strips start lean & tender

    Stringy with juices, tasty on the tongue.

    Sometimes I examine them twirled on a fork before ingestion

    Sometimes I just cram them into an open maw

    To chew for the texture,

    Devouring my life for the nourishment

    Derived from death.

    As if.

    Long Haul Covid

    Executioners – Death By a Thousand Cuts

    I can write now, of food, having achieved the space

    Where taste is gone, where smell is a quick pat to the memory only.

    I spoon the soup

    Knowing it needs salt but why bother? I cannot enjoy it,

    Only feel the spice upon the outer edges of my tongue.

    Tho I crave just that feeling, that rapid glance of

    Rounded taste. So soon removed.

    These round-heeled bastards

    Who have stood over a witchy brew

    Of hate & harm & laid it upon my (no more) senses,

    Now deprived two of five or maybe six.

    Me, who has none to talk to

    Except pieces of paper,

    Except computer screens,

    A.I. faithful to the last

    Like some I Robot, some Elysium “Humans need help!”

    I weep, eyes filling so I close them as fingers know their way

    These keys true in place, holding still

    For constant batter, for endless barter

    My thoughts lifted into blue light

    Also harming me, but what else is there?

    Without these I may not exist beyond life.

    Nor will I after too much time.

    But Freddie sang it best:

    “Who wants to live forever?”

    Isn’t one Eternity of dying enough?

    Bravely Do I Face Each Day

    Pulling the world behind me,

    A mule of effort & bray

    Harnessed into the money straps

    Living a life where I claim my due on Saturday

    A life of stolen glimpses of a sunrise here,

    A star inside a flower there.

    My eyes do not so much as see

    As look beyond – there must be a beyond

    Or I am well & truly lost.

    That this is illusion I do not doubt

    That this is only a frequency I found on an old radio

    A melody of sonnet & sound dislocated from source…

    An afterthought from the mind of solace…

    I live & do not die today,

    Balanced at an edge I do not well perceive,

    The Fool dancing the abyss along the arroyo

    Defining gravity.

    Falling away into Time.

    What’s In A Poem?

    Another poem breathes out, like a sigh of words

    That do not rhyme

    “Don’t poems rhyme?” ask outsiders.

    No, Virginia, or at least mine do not,

    Scraped as they are from the raw undersides

    Of a lonely life

    Made livable by no expectations of more.

    The water wings of verbal misbehavior

    In a pool of living light

    Holding me in suspense

    Will anyone hear? Will anyone see?

    And, saved for last,

    Will it ever matter?

    I have crossed the tracks of positive thought

    To existential angst

    This 3 a.m. of a potential new day.

    Why did I ever peel off from God

    To come here, of all places?

    Where the only realization is unreality?

    Why would I leave rational thought

    For the insanity of trading death for life

    To eat & live &  breathe?

    Movement powered by the lost & found, by sea wrack

    Seeming so useless, yet sustaining in its way.

    Life For The Living

    My appetites stay with me

    All that’s left

    Now there is no life, no best friend, nothing

    But a Universe of spirit to bathe in

    With a body incapable of perceiving this element.

    Is it to the good I continue on?

    I would not know,

    My nose pressed to the window of eternity

    As though I will dine at table there.

    The machinery remembers me

    I have no doubt my car still feels my foot feathering the brake,

    Mashing the gas, no matter  who owns her now.

    I have left poems in unlikely places

    On circuits of memory which knew my bank balance,

    My destinations, my ideas & my names.

    No initials carved into wounded trees

    Once thought to live forever,

    No tinted-rose lenses

    No petals strewn on aisles nor elbows fitted into mine.

    I have learned not to be lonely, a lesson unsought indeed.

    Too much attention to the singular

    Teaches separation so well it’s no longer felt

    The proprioceptors dulled to route & routine

    I arrive through neither fault nor favor

    But a foolhardy trust

    In a system I cannot even prove to exist.

    I live & move & have my being

    Like a fish, being asked, “How’s the water?”

    I have no answers anymore

    Even questions are dull, cutting no edges

    Drawing no eyes.

    I tire of energy fields

    Wanting to power down

    To rust in a field

    Open to the sky.

    Reprise

    It’s the death of a thousand cuts

    The littlest wounds bleeding

    I do not notice seepage

    Only its results

    And these only in the long hours

    Awaiting second sleep’s

    Uneasy dreams.

    I cannot lay my choices off on others anymore

    But sit with them scattered all around me

    The winds of salted time

    Peering under them, lifting edges

    To find other sides.

    A 52 Pickup of a life

    Having played every card.

    The End

  • 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!

  • LETTER TO A PRISONER OF WAR

    I want to visit a prisoner of a relationship of war

    A victim & perpetrator in a crime of passion

    For which he suffers incarceration:

    A young man who never integrated his freedom

    Who took blame by the elbow & made it a confidant

    So now he lives with it (if his sentence truths out)

    For ten years more.

    Who made his prison?

    Does he know he has the tools to escape?

    Being a handyman, he knows tools…

    Oh, he tried. I saw him trying. I heard his “no”

    Echoing in her matrix of sensuous “yes!”

    Who took his body on that wild

    Nightmare of a ride through rage & pain

    Of hurt & ill-wishing

    Of all the darkness of a 2 a.m. vendetta?

    What occupied his mind as he ran

    From the scene

    Shirtless, reeling with fever?

    Did he try to think himself back to innocence

    To that hour before vengeance overtook his mind

    Overpowering his soul?

    How could he know in that moment of lighting

    The match he used for the pleasure of tobacco

    To a world of merciless man-made justice?

    Who is to say he should not pay, this youth

    Made of abusive put downs & unmanned

    By his own son’s cautious return into his life?

    He, who will know little now of light

    Bored beyond numb, attacked on all sides

    Caught in unending scream, this

    Boy-man snared by untrue love

    By masquerade of truth

    By the Jezebel of his own choosing?

    And what of she … but I cannot admit her yet

    Only knowing part of her soul squeals as only a

    Trapped woman can.

    I have no mercy upon her now, no cooling

    Forgiveness for her unending miserliness

    In wishing him such as he suffered at her hands.

    I give this to Mercy with no words of intercession,

    Only the mute knowledge of a mother

    Wanting only to spare this son

    His punishment.

    I give this now, knowing full well the law will

    Extract many pounds of flesh

    Until it reaches bones & gnaws these to salt.

    All for an “I’ll show her!”

    He’s foresworn an entire lifetime

    He might have spent in living

    Had he spent a moment in thought.

    I cannot end this here

    Yet there are no more words to say.

    Carol (for Brandon) 9/20/23

  • The Recovering Psychedelic

    The Recovering Psychedelic

    Just when I thought events could not become more tangled at work – which is my main proving ground at this time of my life – they rewrap the Maypole with a swoop. After all, I did not think I’d be working at this age. Just days shy of the third-quarter-century mark, I thought I’d be reclining with a large-print book in a hammock, sipping chilled lemonade. I seem to be left with a bowl of lemons instead.

    So much of the story I was told is so patently untrue! No wonder I reject nonfiction, favoring the flavors of myth. The tenets of truth have snaked back upon themselves. I am looped in lost causes: the world is not what it was meant to be & nothing like I am supposed to be convinced it is. At this time, I should be well-marinated in fear of all kinds. In truth, I’ve adopted a kind of “Well, it is enough to be what it is.” I swing the spotlight of focus to fall upon the study of love instead.

    But love’s a hard sell today. Love’s the used car salesman with the toothy smile, the circus barker shouting wonders to be seen just inside this tent right here, Little Lady, the priest slicing a tomahawk hand to separate body & soul, ostensibly in blessing. Love, like truth, has become unrecognizable except in parody & mushy sentiment. Yes, my eyes still prick with tears at photos of kittens. But love is more the tears in reaction when the sun rises over an edge to the East, huge, quivering, brilliant, scintillant. One sunrise is so much more than my entire life will ever be, yeh?

    I do not know if these words will capture fame, but they have encompassed my fate. I wonder who understands them. I get few comments & faint praise. Neither of these decides me in any other direction other than to continue on with them. I am building my own structure in my own time with my own hands, my own materials. The wind whistles through; pages flip & tear; bytes devour meaning.

    I have come to understand there is no insurance policy for Stupid, no shield for accusations of others telling me I’m less than I am. I understand their need perhaps better than many when I get their rightness bears them up more strongly than mine lifts me. But I have withered from a shining mare on the hillside, satin & thin-skinned, to a burro (or an ass) with a wrinkled muzzle sprouting strong black hairs.

    I’ve done my share of walking in circles. I’ve borne the curses of others & found self unresentful, if stung. I am quick to educate but students do not always care for the diploma I confer.

    In the long run, my truth means more to me than that of others. Is this not the way it is supposed to be? I have changed from inattention, unconcern, bullish insistence & sheer perversity to a half-paid attention with overtones of belief bobbing about. I know my truth; it’s only yours I doubtfully accept.

    A friend likened me recently to a dragon & I have one as my spirit totem, so this is not a totally fabricated tale. Dragons are aloof, she said – I thought it was sheer neglect of humans. I don’t know anyone like me & I hardly “know myself” in the classical sense of the admonition.

    For me, it has not been about that although it’s bruited as the Meaning of Life. Mine is the role of observer, not the participant, in most encounters. If these point up where others “went wrong,” this is my marvel, not my blame, my preference, not my alignment. Because in the end of my time, when I roll out of that swaddling cloth & tip the lemons to the ground, I will find myself at a beginning once more.

    Let me in, God, I will say. Could You just let me in?

  • Alignment

    What does it mean to have no dreams? That blog before this one, where I made a wish? This is some years later in the writing…

    I took a class recently “Aligning Inner Self.” Now, I am quite snobbish about taking classes. I teach them, right? I tried not to be judgmental. I went with an attitude of learning & so I did. I learned about balance, specifically mine.

    Teacher relied heavily on movie analogies. “Picture this like the scene from that.” One of the exercises was to express a desire: a wish in fact. It was to discern a future where we wished our way in. What was for gain was to ping the 100% Happiness Button. He had us picture it in the form of a hologram held in one hand. I did not even cup my palm as the others did. I realized there was nothing in that moment, nothing in my life, I would change in order to have one thing else. I am at a point of perfect balance. How often this might happen is rivaled only by the number of times it is realized. My tiny hologram Princess Leia (his analogy, not mine) did not need to materialize.

    When he asked what we had out-pictured, I said “I pass” & inclined my head to the next student. Later – and I knew he would do this – he returned to the topic, smiling at me as he asked was there anything around my not wanting to share? I felt defensive admitting I had no wish. After a breath, I said, “Well, nothing came into my mind as you asked that, so I had to honor that nothing.” He smiled harder, clasped his hands together in a Namasté. He inclined his head to me. I blinked. He was able to allow a student to be his teacher in this moment.

    Later, I would worry that non-wish like a seed, trying to get it caught between two teeth so I could chew it up. I thought about how I could have seen a freshly-authored mile of books in front of me – or even just the next one – or being a celebrated author, renowned in several languages. I could have wished to be slim, but I would lose too much of myself.

    These did not occur to me then. Then nothing stirred the well I was gazing into.

    And since I’m getting pathological about sharing secrets (tho not with you, Dear Reader), I may not have shared whatever wish mounted the sub-basement stairs to peer into a ready-made Reality. I would have pinned it in a steely gaze, told it “Wait! Who are you?” Held up a hand to stop it… while my face said, “no dreams neded here, move along.”

    I had occasion to go through a period recently of intense dislike of myself. It had no overt reason I could think … just was. I honored that.

    It seems to have spun back onto itself & the space it left has filled with comfort.

    This is all I need right now: you reading this blog, me writing it. If I have to meet the world reader by reader, I am ready to write.

    Love,  Carol

  • Every Hope

    “AND EVERY HOPE IS WORTH SAVING”                  TSO: The Lost Child

    “There is a child that’s part of my soul.”                          TSO; The Lost Child

    “Oh, to be so old & have your life just begin”                  TSO: The Lost Child

    It Begins!                                                                           TSO: The Lost Child

    I could not live well without hope. I live for it, within it, around it & for it – all at once.  I perceive the many levels on which life occurs, understanding I am not the highest nor the lowest. I am life expressing itself as only I can: an individual of worth & knowledge unduplicated in all the Youniverse.

    The words “without hope” are not in my lexicon. I love to think every hope is indeed worth saving, and that somewhere in time/space they are. Maybe this is what St. Peter records, what the Akashic Records store, rather than the salt & ash of our fevered thoughts.

    We must live as though nothing else matters. Our reasons for being surround us – possessions, ideas, inner urgings & outward expressions equally weighing in. Lately I see the phrase “where we go one, we go all” as a truism urging me to my best expression. Anything less would be inadequate to the privilege of individuated breath which I am in the process of becoming.    

    If anyone had told me as a child, I would grow up into the person I now claim to be, I may have rolled my big brown eyes & formed the mudra to “avert evil” with my right hand. I was incapable of assimilating the hope of a better life. Indeed, for years in between the good occurred the experiences which now allow me to appreciate my level of homeostasis with grace & less yearning than ever before.

    My biggest wish now is to find someone with whom to finish out this life. I know this, too, shall be granted. My inner child is at play in the fields of Love; she will accomplish all she has set out to do in the face of her wishes made upon stars which have moved out into a more grandiose space afar.

    Every day I see with new eyes. Nor is all I see in its ideal space. Hope is the slippery grace allowing it to achieve this…an effort worth expending, an energy pursuing.

    Trying to recall when I wrote this. I would say 2019, fresh from Samurai Roads by a year.   Cb

  • 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.

  • Healing Language Itself

    Healing Language Itself

    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” or “un-saying” 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 once again be 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 our being in the world & practicing that assertion whether timely or not. Words are magical, that’s why spelling is so important.

    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.

    We could not knowany of this at one time. My lack of clear childhood memories is likely because I paid absolutely no attention to any other reality than the one I lived on & it rarely touched mainstream. School would ground me with the idea of learning. Once I started reading, I was Lazarus to be brought from the tomb every time I was called. I hardly knew to come in out of the rain & my Guides are still in angelic rehab from tending to me. Books were my lifelong Saving Grace & words the song my being is still singing.

    I always identified deeply with words. I was a good speller, I could write a Composition at the drop of a rosary bead & I knew lots of words.

    I remain the quintessential nerd from an era when the word didn’t even exist.

    With kind eyes,

    Carol