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  • Apotheosis

    Apotheosis

    PRAYERS OF THE TRAVELER

    The priest, the postulant, the penitent

    Evoke the random ministrations

    Of universe, pointing at my sins & laughing

    The Pastor said, “don’t follow your heart lest it lead

    To falsity…”

    But I’m just not that independent; I need heart to

    Shine my way, to filter my thoughts, to bring me

    To the altar where I will not kneel, but

    Reach instead my arms to God

    With my heart outstretched, elastic

    Ready for the learning, for the leaning

    Ready for the love to flow from me for me

    So ready for the love, God, the magnification

    Of who I am into who You are

    Not boasting, but becoming the outpouring

    Of all You have shared with me

    That I may express You with my life

    With actions, speech & understanding

    “Know thyself to know God.”

    APOTHEOSIS

    I play in halcyon days

    Ingesting, digesting

    Parsing, praying.

    Offsets of accomplishment

    The truth of divine mind

    Made manifest by my actions.

    Even this far along in life

    Rich with effort, rife with falling short

    The paths of life forever circular

    Still, I strive like salmon reborn upstream

    After flying against persistence

    To be recreated

    In Your image.

    A PRAYER AT 5:15 a.m.

    Wholeness in the world

    Begins setting myself to rights

    Tugging down my shirt

    Polishing old shoes with miles of soul

    Searching for the heights of spirit

    Falling short, then falling in

    The flow catches me,

    Asks if I’m ready,

    Tosses me towards heaven

    Telling me to fly it on my own

    In a whisper, constant & sure

    The Holy Spirit of effort

    Builds ladders to the stars

    While I stand aground, looking up.

    Knowledge smiles upon me

    Wisdom takes me by the hand

    Aligns me to Spirit

    Over & over again

    Never losing patience or

    Succumbing to anger’s frustration.

    Build for me a heaven, Lord

    Just for me? You promised

    A Holy Land at the end!

    Where I become my own nourishment

    Healthy & wholly

    In service to God.

    Mother Nature brooms the landscape

    Shaping with wind so generous to share the dust

    On my heels back to earth.

    While lifting me into Love.

    MY PRAYER AT 1:30 P.M.

    Never to have the same moment

    To be bored or tired of life

    But accepting change

    As its axis

    While I spin in its regard,

    The Father’s child, the mother’s girl,

    Gathered up in arms to rest my head

    (My heavy head)

    Upon your shoulder.

    My heart to yours, beating in holy synchrony

    Inspired with breath, with mirroring You

    With shining eyes & windblown hair

    A kid You can be proud of

    “Watch me, Lord!

    I am doing this all for You.

  • Covid Heart

    Covid Heart

    A short bout with Omicron has left me with heart flutters, a strange appetite for sugar & hotdogs with mustard only, for doughy rolls & canned food. What the hell is this? How could a virus change my organs? I am more timid, less allowing, rigid too. This outcome is definitely not of nature which has never forced itself against me so, obscene in overture, slippery smiles & tentacles snapping, reaching to snare my unwary parts.

    I must be more conscious now. I defy these symptoms with salads, with rice crackers. I tell my heart, “Wait a mo’” while I fix a coffee to test the boundaries of its beats. I defy this new normal & create yet another unmoved by terror of failure. My past is already satiated & complacent. It is only the present with which I struggle.

    I surge forward & upward, escaping the snaky holds. I will not cower before another man’s creation. I will not surrender if there is aught in me to continue the fight. Nothing not of God will enter me, control me, devour me.

    COVID HEART

    The fear in my heart pulls in the edges, isolates me

    Protects itself, its waves recede;

    The open beach left exposed is flat, empty,

    Bubbles sink & dry, harden, their

    Moisture drained. The winds begin a wail

    Whip up frenzy

    Heart cowers more, sinking deeper into self

    Crusts over so little more can enter

    Stung by sand whipped

    Almost mooing, my heart remains bovine.

    One morning, the winds will still

    thinking me cowed…

    The tides return; the memory retreats, That moment

    I leap, anticipating its return, I leap

    To an understanding – that knowledge that I have

    Shown fear my future

    & frightened it away.

    Begone, Fear! You have no power here!

    The vast engines of energy gear up with a roar

    Stunned, my little self finds a vision larger to inhabit

    Hastens there, slamming doors behind

    That fear may not follow.

    In the new light of being unafraid

    Emerged from fear’s long shadow

    I create again

    I move again forward

    I gather all about me

    In triumph

    Heart emerges in fanfare, confetti, parade!

    I am healed. Unblemished. Ready.

  • Who’s to tell me what’s possible?

    Who’s to tell me what’s possible?

    I don’t think I know anyone who’s in charge anymore. This is now mine but I’ve disowned it before, effectively, too. It’s too clearly defining to try to pass along this one now.

    What if I’ve had a bucket list going since the beginning, I just didn’t know it then? If everything has happened to me in the right place at the right time eliciting the right emotional ringtone and I answered? What? Did I do something wrong?

    I wonder where I’d be if the word ‘better’ had been erased from my life. I was always compared to that. It made life longer somehow. It’s a can’t-win word. Likely not the first of its kind I encountered.

    I do feel the groundswell of a major change oncoming. If tech has been kept a hundred years out from us – a generous idea – how far behind am I anyway? If my generation has iPhones, they have telepathy for sure. But theirs isn’t to be considered mine anymore.  

    Forging the next path is all i can see now. There’s absolutely no time to look behind me, not for followers, not for the ones who didn’t – like parents & siblings who led the way, leaving me on my own. They think of me now – like it was 100 years ago they were here.

    And I still don’t care. I’m still the same stubborn child with crossed eyes & chewed fingers, the same electric-strange hair & attitude. Just because I’ll never catch up, I am not stopped from moving on. Just because I don’t even know where or when I’m going … I am not stopped from moving on.

    It’s all trivialities. It’s all a moment on the beach, that perfect moment 100 years ago when there was nowhere else to be.

  • Off the cuff

    Off the cuff

    When I found that ‘fabric’ in a tall pile at the flea market this morning, I knew it to be the so-far elusive “tablecloth” (something with yellow & cheerful) I’d been searching for. In my hands!

    (My table has a large chip missing. I like to cover that up. A cloth is so much easier to deal with… but I have to live with it in my kitchen. I want something I can live with. What does that say about my life, that I need to have an in-house relationship with my tablecloth? Put that in your dishwasher & hit soak.)

    After scrubbing the table up, I put the pattern on it. I stood back & laughed, my mind flashing on my 9th Grade Home Economics Teacher, Helen Something & how she looked when I chose the most difficult pattern in the box to make for Homecoming. It had gathers in it, stitching across the back, oh my! I could not & if you want to be picky about it, still c a n n o t thread a needle. But the front of that dress was ready to display 4 months later.

    I have a karma with patterns. When I was out of teen-hood but barely, my sister decided to show me how to sew. She gave me a pattern & fabric to cut out on her king size bed. Which I did, also making a pattern of her deep green bedspread. And I had not even seen Gone With the Wind at that point.

    Well, I just wanted to share that little bit of my afternoon with you. I couldn’t resist the thought of putting a smile on that face!

    Love,

    Carol

  • Post for Mom

    Post for Mom

    If the focus on physical is no longer working, it is time to develop a new focus: to assume Creatorship, also referred to as Sovereignty (Over-reign) (reign over). But we can only claim it one at a time & only for ourselves.

    We’re more comfortable in a blend: Some braid in with the “growing trend” folks, others with the “oats” crowd. Few want to figure it out beyond their acculturated worldview. But in the rush to experience, depth is lost. Actions are unplanned, results not thought-through. Such randomness bespeaks chaos.

    It becomes more complex when language is corrupted into a coarse string of trigger words – language used to be safe once upon a time, a “safe space” place.

    Welladay, it’s been that for me in my life. More so lately, as I take time to relish it.

    I figure no less than embracing the Transcendent will work here. What’s your take on it? How did you ever put down the Cosmos you are created to bring in, to participate, to populate to this place of here & now? Or is that memory gone, too, like so many that surely were real when happening? Where did our childhoods go?

    But what life has proved to me overall is its ephemerality. Yet it is all we know … this physical tag along, drag along body. But it was what we came in for: the reason we dug down into DNA to make most of it automatic, to free up Creativity. We came back in the Michelin Human Suit just to experience shedding the many outer, ephemeral bodies, peeling these away (repealing them). We can only do one body at a time as we uncover to the core (le Coeur). How many of us can get that naked? Even for our God? Yet what else is there to offer a  god?

    I came into it without even a blanket to my name. A space was carved for me by Mom: her tunnel to happiness was where she led me to, knowing it a fallback if others failed. I wandered around the landscape for awhile, but in the end, stepped into its cool interior & felt my way along its walls.

    I took the bit particularly hard, being Libra. In being “set up” by Mom & Society & growing up in a once-removed beach resort. (In casting back, I realize I’ve lived in resort settings all my life – a place to be to celebrate, but also cheap living when they were not. That place to be when there’s no way change is to be had, as in being at your “last resort.” I was a child in a resort many resorted to for recreation (re-Creation) of their ragtop to Cadillac rides, a return to the mainline after a time-out in Wildwood.

    A resort-dweller is to be permanent amongst the fluctuating crowd: those who did not know the beach or the boardwalk as part of the neighborhood. We natives opted to watch  them carefully; we were truly small-town folk amongst the city-dwellers & mostly profoundly grateful for that largesse.

    I may be off-track already. I wanted to tell you there’s ways to go no matter who you follow, but you’ll always find the steadiest track to be the one where you’re comfortable. Getting comfortable takes more strength than we are given credit for & usually unprepared around when events happen in our lives. Being or staying comfortable in the spaces of enormous change are why we strip away all else.

    I live in a land blasted by light & by the irregularities that have happened here. Once again, it is ramping up behind me, breathing a certain fire to singe the hair on my ears. Once again, I turn to stand in it, to face it, to absorb it, to resort to light for my healing. So, tell me again, why do I need this body?

    To feel the light?

    (Thanks for watching. Love you, C)

  • No More Mr. Nice Girl.

    No More Mr. Nice Girl.

    HOW MANY DREAMS MAKE A SAINT?

    (As many as prayers enwrap sin.)

    Make me flexible again, Lord,

    Bring me to that place of comfort

    In this everlasting body.

    Let me be but another Beginning

    One more Easter; re-admitting the Light

    I carry it upon me,

    A cape of strong silk

    Snapped out to stop the wind & fly.

    There is a ray of light with my name on it

    Somewhere here – I know it!

    Another elusive Start, supported

    Unreservedly by universe.

    I am best at beginnings…

    The one keeping track,

    making notches on my stick…

    Must be plumb worn-out by now!

    Quelle Stupide!

    Holding my horses while I’m in the parade is lunacy!

    NO MORE MR. NICE GIRL

    I look as sappy in the photo as the cottonwood behind me

    And when did I ever wear pink in Real Life?

    No more!

    I don’t even know what I’m missing

    Except it’s no longer there.

    A sea entered my inner chambers

    Hollowed/hallowed as any woman –

    Wrought the change you see here

    The rebirthing: resistance re-inflating.

    What emerges? Who is this new Being?

    …she who no longer needs pink?

    In the desert, sometimes butterflies turn into dragons.

    ANOTHER

    I put the mirror low, to see myself coming & going.

    First is awareness; teaching myself what to look for

             By seeing what others see.

    I built a wall I thought a lattice

    A work of temporary art that became a template

    Situations fill themselves in

    Too broad by far: whole emotional categories apply

    To a scintilla of evidence!

    BOUFFANT

    “Becoming the universe” is the soul’s ultimate

    Philadelphia Experiment:

    Something here

    Appears there.

    Then very little ever matches up again.

    It seems my mind

    Wants to dart for every circumstance…

    Fear keeps one paw upraised.

    I’ve Got A Secret

    At first it seems covert:

    The Path: The Mystery: The Rest.

    But now all that’s trappings…

    And I’m on about mileage.

    Make haste! Tempus Fugit!

    MY INNER TEEN

    Knows nothing but what she wants

    The little thief dishes guilt like hash

    Serves it hot & smelly

    Sends it down the line

    Souring

    The little Righteous Scold

    Who only knows rules & rulers, really,

    Whose heart compressed them

    Into puckered arrows arcing the sky

    Putting all to distance.

    Her Worlds gone hormonal

    Too much knowledge, not near enough Knowing.

    Beads, rattles, bells

    Remind me where I’m from

    Tho dry, I know ceremony counts

    In stays broad & elemental

    Verily I repeat, “There are not enough women singing.”

    Mother Earth needs the voices of her daughters

    The rhythms of women walking

    That gentle, constant drumming

    The light patter of every girl-child

    Returns as fish & butterfly

    Retracing their paths

    To beginnings.

    To review the terms

    Refine the Vision

    Reclaim the prizes left behind.

      

           Cheat

    Why only & ever a chip off the old block,

    It seems to be I got as much as I ever wanted from that quarry.

    This is not yet the time I am to strike flint & create fire.

    I stand along a widow’s walk

    Near a bridge, feeling equally suspended

    When all I ever wanted was to be a rock.

    ROLL

    May this wind bless our presence

    May this rain bring forth our garden

    When the One-Way signs point at each other

    Often at crossroads,

    Don’t take on any more lifetimes

    Than you can handle.

    Just walk straight through.

    Take some time to sit with the cat.

    Carol Borsello

    April 2022

  • Once More Into the Breach

    Once More Into the Breach

    People sometimes say they are a “product” of their times. What does that really make us? Who produced us? What’s the role of a producer? Telling an actor how to act. Wait a minute, this is getting complicated & I was trying to make it simpler.

    For years I have used the tools I was given to engineer my life. However, I’m not a “tools” kind of gal. I joke all the time about my “Hello Kitty” plastic tool kit being all I’ll ever need… I’ve listed it before on the blog, in a kind of wonder – how did I survive on my own with only this to repair it? The toolkit was always an admonition of guilt: I can’t do this; time to ask for help. At the risk of assuring the “in” in “inept,” I never got the hang of driving in a nail, or hanging a picture straight. So that meant hanging it twice, which was really four times the trouble when I gathered my head around it. I’ve enlisted the help of tall people all the time – in stores, where I will approach a total stranger (who’s tall) to ask him to get me a jar of something on the top shelf. I wrote the lists: my ex used to ask strangers to read them for him; then they would speculate on what the little lady really wanted. Going to the store, for him, with one of my scribbled lists, must have been like Frodo walking out of the hobbit-house with the Ring in his inside pocket.

    We never know the ripples downstream from where we stir the water.

    Tools bring up an immediate physical reaction in me: I put my hands behind my back. I don’t even touch them.

    I’ve done this with my life a few times too. I’ve always opted to sail past the self-help section into sci-fi/fantasy, usually opted for the heroine I childishly & wonderfully pictured myself to be. The posturing & the great cloud of unknowing I resided in were a double-whammy to learning life by logic. Overall, I’m not quite sure there is a logic to life. Mine, for example, has been random at times to the point of writing the word ‘hopscotch’ to describe it. My resumes were chock-full of growing responsibilities in the work arena: would I have applied that energy to personal growth, I’d be running my own whatever. I left out the work of the tool-bearer completely.

    But while I imagined living in a vacuum, it was never the case. I affected (afflicted?) any number of people over a lifetime of monetary focus: I chose currency as the currency to live by. At this point, there’s no use assigning a good or bad to it. Acknowledgements alone work as witness to the event. It was a choice I do not regret: I was funneled into it & it is still working in its own way.

    When the writing pushes up between the cracks in my brain, when the truth of my ineffectuality is known on all levels but this: & I cannot know if it is even worthwhile except to me… ?

    In fact, just like another fabulous & long-lasting analogy: if the tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a noise? If everyone ignores all my writings meant to entertain, identify, belong with, enjoy manifestation with on this level … if no one reads me, do I exist?

    I rely on the ripples.

    Love,

    Carol

  • Where. From. Here?

    Where. From. Here?

    If the focus on physical is no longer working, it is time to develop a new focus: to assume Creatorship, also referred to as Sovereignty (Over-reign) (reign over). But we can only claim it one at a time & only for ourselves.

    We’re more comfortable in a blend: Some braid in with the “growing trend” folks, others with the “oats” crowd. Few want to figure it out beyond their acculturated worldview. But in the rush to experience, depth is lost. Actions are unplanned, results not thought-through. Such randomness bespeaks chaos.

    It becomes more complex when language is corrupted into a coarse string of trigger words – language used to be safe once upon a time, a “safe space” place.

    Welladay, it’s been that for me in my life. More so lately, as I take time to relish it.

    I figure no less than embracing the Transcendent will work here. What’s your take on it? How did you ever put down the Cosmos you are created to bring in, to participate, to populate to this place of here & now? Or is that memory gone, too, like so many that surely were real when happening? Where did our childhoods go?

    But what life has proved to me overall is its ephemerality. Yet it is all we know … this physical tag along, drag along body. But it was what we came in for: the reason we dug down into DNA to make most of it automatic, to free up Creativity. We came back in the Michelin Human Suit just to experience shedding the many outer, ephemeral bodies, peeling these away (repealing them). We can only do one body at a time as we uncover to the core (le Coeur). How many of us can get that naked? Even for our God? Yet what else is there to offer a  god?

    I came into it without even a blanket to my name. A space was carved for me by Mom: her tunnel to happiness was where she led me to, knowing it a fallback if others failed. I wandered around the landscape for awhile, but in the end, stepped into its cool interior & felt my way along its walls.

    I took the bit particularly hard, being Libra. In being “set up” by Mom & Society & growing up in a once-removed beach resort. (In casting back, I realize I’ve lived in resort settings all my life – a place to be when things are great, a place to be when there’s no way change is to be had, as in being at your “last resort.” I was a child in a resort many resorted to for recreation (re-Creation) of their ragtop to Cadillac rides, a return to the mainline after a time-out in Wildwood.

    A resort-dweller is to be permanent amongst the fluctuating crowd: those who did not know the beach or the boardwalk as part of the neighborhood. We natives opted to watch  them carefully; we were truly small-town folk amongst the city-dwellers & mostly profoundly grateful for that largesse.

    I may be off-track already. I wanted to tell you there’s ways to go no matter who you follow, but you’ll always find the steadiest track to be the one where you’re comfortable. Getting comfortable takes more strength than we are given credit for & usually unprepared around when events happen in our lives. Being or staying comfortable in the spaces of enormous change are why we strip away all else.

    I live in a land blasted by light & by the irregularities that have happened here. Once again, it is ramping up behind me, breathing a certain fire to singe the hair on my ears. Once again, I turn to stand in it, to face it, to absorb it, to resort to light for my healing. So, tell me again, why do I need this body?

    To feel the light?

    (Thanks for watching. Love you, C)

  • Becalmed by Light

    Becalmed by Light

    Only I can turn poverty into reality. Where is my real wealth? I am spotting it in so many places now. Is this my Nesara? My recognition of self & other’s worth? Yes, certainly.

    I no longer need put up with what I felt that way about. I no longer need to feel anyone is not nourishing me, nor wishing me well, even if misunderstood in their reality. Yesterday I said hello to four strangers sitting in the wine bar, each with a long-stem glass in right hand, poised around a face… these faces looked up at me, the ruder intruder burgeoning in to wish all well! Here’s the scoop: I was looking for a lovely friend, the owner; not only that, but I had cleaned the very chairs on which they were snobbing. I mopped the floors under their single-foot-legs-crossed poses.

    I laughed to consider they would consider me a “rube” or whatever they call hill-people-strangers these days. Rube is the most polite…

    I rejoiced in the sharp sunset light, the long, long shadows fanning the street. I celebrated the memory of living in this town, of being in many of the houses. I reveled in the thought that I had cleaned the entire Lady of Guadalupe R.C. church entirely on my own, reliving my childhood effectively, this time with permission to touch.

    It was a very releasing day, yesterday. Empowering.

    At the end of it, I wanted only to be in my own home, put away from everyone. After the time “home alone,” & plague, I am still sensitive of others nearby. Literally sensitive. My skin feels them & I am no longer accustomed to being seen.

    Poverty is not living as well as I think I want to. Yet it isn’t giving things up either or, rather, seems to me to be. Until I have a recognition like yesterday’s, a review of/in the light, an attention-caller to what was my reality only four years ago.

    Perhaps it has always been only change which is familiar. I am willing to change, but I want to do it my way, in my own time, in answer to my own questions. I’ve had enough freedom & done things my way pretty much. Is that not an untold wealth as valuable as any chest of rubies in a sea-cave?

  • Post No Bills

    Post No Bills

    Attach nothing to this life.

    this life is nothing in & of itself.

    I’ve been doing it for maybe longer than you

    all I’ve learned is I no longer want to be a particle

    but a wave.

    What do the words mean anymore?

    I understand when I say them, I’m posting the wrong message

    the one that these go for in this time.

    I’m not talking them in today’s terms, though.

    I gave up the moving forward & am taking a u-turn.

    I need to have my today re-couched in yesterday.

    And not just any yesterday, but a specific, focused, energetic of a yesterday.

    the one where words had definition, & borders amongst themselves, & meanings.

    I speak them that way at times.

    I’m zooming in on my past, doing a close-up on who I was; with who I Am

    aligning the two.

    Once I got that, I’ll bring in who I want to be.

    Life’s Little Potato Peeler

    I like the analogy of being a whittler, of tiny shaves & curls of wood

    tickling down to feather at my feet.

    i like the idea that there might be a beginner spirit in the wood

    waiting to get out, to sit on the shelf

    to move among the thrift stores of the world.

    I know at times, I do this with my life.

    My pen makes a great tool; the sharpest knife ever,

    that, & my words.

    Each memory I consign to the forest floor

    will blow into someone else’s tale.