In the Blue of the Flame

I don't want
to sit around
or sing and dance
and tell stories
around a sacred fire,

I want to stand
in the blue
of the flame -
naked,
groundless,
yet alive,

tempered by
an unquenchable longing
to meet myself
in my fiery wholeness,
reclaiming the majesty
and insignificance
of what I am
and what I'm here to do,
in a world that's content
to share stories around a fire,
too terrified to burn
its fingers and toes.

Wall of Words

and you throw words
in the way
of my seeing,
so I can first
touch and feel
the walls of your heart,
so I can grope
and stumble
and fall in
through the black tunnels
of a love
that does not seek light
but only wants to live,
and feel
unapologetically
alive!

I Bring You Myself

I bring you my myself, my all.
Every time.
Will you meet me where I am?
Now?

I bring you my lingering melancholy, my heartache, my sadness that sits on me like a heavy cloak as I walk miles and miles of emptiness on a long wintry day. A cloak that bears down on a frail frame, that sometimes finds it hard to carry its own self and take just one more firm step into the grim wilderness. Sometimes that cloak keeps me warm and cozy and I need it to get through this winter. Sometimes I want to take it off and feel the cold bite my taut, cracked skin. And so I bring you myself.
Will you stand with me in that frozen landscape and watch the falling white and the rolling greys and blacks, without asking me to think of spring that's just around the corner? Will you carry my weary load with me? Will you snuggle inside and make light those endless miles? Or will you watch me from afar with pitiful, laughing eyes that have forgotten, even for a moment, what it feels like to shiver and freeze, and carry a heavy load for miles and miles, all alone?

I bring you my shattered dreams - precious pieces of that beautiful crystal vase that once held a single rose of hope and love; perfections in the dainty dollhouse of my mind's eye, that could not be broken. But they did break like all fragile, impermanent things, and I cried and wailed as every shard that fell, dug into tender skin, that did not know what it meant to be touched and held with love. I bring you those wails and wounds that sting and bleed, smarting with the salt of those pain-filled tears that never found a warm home. And so I bring you myself.
Will you sit with me as I hurt and die into those piercing shards still intact, not for once wanting to pluck them out, to stop the bleeding or the wailing or the tears? Will you hold me in your arms, will you collect all my tears and sing me a silent song that falls like gentle rain, numbing the pain and the loss, like balm for a flailing soul? Will you know as you patiently caress my broken heart, that those dreams were as real as the lit up lanterns of wonder and magic in a child's innocent eyes, and not the wispy clouds that disappear over an impending horizon that never arrives? Will you whisper to me then that it is okay for me to dream yet again, knowing that there is a beauty in that humanness, that creation and its death, to nurture more life?

I bring you my memories pressed between the pages of my life, like pretty flowers and leaves picked on many a walk into the wild recesses of my soul. I bring you all of them for each is the beginning or the end of a chapter, a tidbit of my life. I know that there is prettiness even in the most ugly of them, even if I don't see them that way now. And that is why I bring them to you....so you will see them as I see them now. I bring you the depressing ones that are hidden in the darkest corners of my heart, that come back to haunt me like shadow puppets on a stone wall, and some that hurt like stitches still unremoved. I bring you soft memories of the special people who touched my life, some people who are no longer there and some who I have wished away. I bring you myself.
Will you turn each page with the slowness of the moment, losing yourself with me and those wild flowers, walking those forest paths all over again, simply because they are beautiful and wild? Will you keep each page open and listen to me, until I am ready to turn the page myself and close the book for now or forever? Will you listen to the stories that each flower speaks this moment, and know that they are there now for a reason that still serves me; that they make me feel alive and real and messily human?

I bring you my words - all garbled and scrawly and muddy as I speak, even as I know that they rise from the clear spring deep inside, and I bring you my silence, that fills up the crinkled white paper of a tongue that cannot move freely. I bring you the pain and the joy of that womb of silence where spoken words are like messengers who have lost their way. There are beautiful stories that live in that forest of silence - stories set free by message drums and not shouted out from treetops, because there is a grace and rhythm in that silence. And so I bring you myself.
Will you listen to the deep cadence of that pain and joy and collect all of them, all my words, like pebbles from a forest stream? Will you dip your feet now into those muddy waters and splash around with me like a little child who doesn't care about the colour of water, nor wanting to walk on upstream? Will you join me in a song or dance to the drumbeat of my throbbing heart, or will you wish for another song?


I bring you my trust, both strong and fragile, like rays of sunlight slanting through a heavy, unrelenting sky, or like dapples of light dancing on newborn leaves, bringing everything to life. I bring you that flickering flame of a tea-light that dances with the fickle wind, because I know that it is my burning that lights me up and the dark room where you sit. I bring you myself again and again.
Will you watch me dance until I get tired and rest in the folds of your dark room for a while, only to be lit again some other place, some other time? Will you hold me close and wall me with your palm, just so I can dance a little longer? Will you light up yourself just so we can dance together awhile and spread a little more light in a dark, gloomy world?

I bring you my hate, my anger, my failures, my terrors and my shame - those weeds that grow over and over again, in a garden that I have been taught to keep pruned and pretty. I bring you the exhaustion of overworking at pulling them out every time they pop out from the giving soil, hiding the beautiful flowers that everyone wants to pick and keep. I don't want a manicured garden where I can sit on a deck with a book and sips of warm tea. I want a wild backyard which is home to dancing butterflies and wiggling worms, where I can find myself and take a walk bare feet.
Will you walk with me in my little garden, holding hands and singing a song, as we watch the weeds and the butterflies and the worms that crawl along? Will you stand with me unafraid and open-chested, kick off your well-worn shoes and step with me on the rugged stones, gravel, soft grass and thorns?

I bring you my love, an offering of a single rose at the altar of sweet self-forgetting; the swell of an ocean that never relents to the sky or the earth and yet dances with both; and the bright light of the ever-exploding stars in the distance . A love that doesn't need sunglasses, cloches, life-vests or armours. A rose that lives amidst thorns, because that is what makes it a rose. An ocean that rises and dies into each moment, because it knows how to live and love. A star that burns itself up just so it can light up another world. And so I bring you myself. My whole self.
Will you take off your shields and masks that don't become you, because you don't need them when you stand up and look in the eyes of love? Because love can only look into itself and reflect its own light and beauty into the eyes of the beholder? Will you bow down at the altar and make an offering as you pick up that single rose? Or will you look away, with that half turn of your face, into the desert sands of dead habit, seeing everything as a mirage that can never quench your thirst?

I bring you my myself, my all.
Every time.
What will you do?
Will you meet me where I am?
Beyond those fields of right and wrong,
in the absence of all reason,
in the thick of all seasons,
in the presence of raw humanness -
yours and mine,
and look into the empty vault
of infinite possibilities?

Meet me where I am.
Not where you think you are.
Not where you want me to be.
Just where I am. Now.

Memories

memories
orphaned, like
glistening sea shells
strewn
on a desolate beach,
washed ashore
anew
with every ebb
and flow;
some broken,
some opened,
some empty,
some intact;
a myriad colours
and forms,
each one holds
a different story
waiting to unfold;
as two tiny feet
upon the shifting sands,
stop awhile to gaze
and pick them up -
shards of an old
broken heart
and a blotted out world,
that long to find
a new home,
in her warm
precious folds;
reminders
of what it means
to be in touch
with what is
real,
broken,
human,
alive.

Alive

to feel the melting sunbeams
on taut brown broken skin,
to hear a bird out somewhere
fluttering its still moist wings,
to watch crisp golden ripples
stretch aimlessly across to a sleepy shore,
to unwrap the deafening silence
of a frosted morning score,
to untie ribbons of orange and blue
and peer into the empty vault,
to smell the brine in the wild wind adrift
and fall upon a long-lost happy song,
to breathe, sing, love and hate,
to smile, cry, rant and play,
all in one breath -
it is enough.
enough,
to be alive.

Walls and Windows

you first start
to build walls;
you shut out
yourself
from yourself;
trembling
inside;
cemented
between
fear
and love -
a mind
at war
with itself,
a heart
wanting
to break
open;

and then,
you come to do
the strangest thing -
you leave space
for a window;
to look in, and
look out.

when you don't
build walls
you don't need
windows;
you can stand
with your head held high,
and a heart that's broken
wide open,
to let in the heavens
that are waiting
to embrace you,
to inspire you,
to be alive,
and to dance
into the darkest night,
and the most glorious morning.

Notes to Myself - 6

Numbing oneself from something is not really a way of escaping (although it may seem like that from the outside), but is actually a way of getting completely 'into' something else and deeply. Something that moves you, gets you in touch with yourself and makes you feel alive. It feels great to be alive!

***************** 

A cup full of love, is too full to receive any more.
A cup that is empty of love, always yearns for more.
A cup that is half full, always has enough. It can give and receive love with equanimity.

***************** 

Being Real, Being Alive

I want to bury
all notions of
love, beauty,
joy and peace
and everything else
that dazzles us
to seek and search,
on this endless road
to possess what is not.
They have danced for long
before our empty eyes.

I want to listen now
to the tiny weeds,
that hold out relentlessly,
hidden in the undergrowth;
the thistles, the mistletoe,
the suckers, the poison ivy;
I want to feel
what it is like to be them;
what is it that drives them?
They must have a song
that's gone unheard
in the glare and din.

And when I've listened
to them long enough,
holding my words and thoughts
in a silent aquifer,
I will know what it is
to hate and to love,
to be ugly and beautiful,
to be wounded and euphoric,
to be distressed and at peace.

I will know then
what it is
to give life
to every seed
that's watered
by an unseen hand -
the rafflesia, the rose,
the suckers, the sequoias;
by being real, being alive.

They will come...

I like to stand alone
sometimes -
the lone tree
in a field of dreams;
roots gnaw steadily, into
stuck-in-the-mud beliefs;
spreading slowly,
grounded in the now;
there's nothing to seek,
nothing to wonder,
and so I just be;
flowers and leaves
grow, and they fall
to kiss my roots -
an offering to myself;
if I build myself,
they will come...
the birds, the bees,
the humans, the breeze;
I'll come alive
in a new way then -
the lone tree
in a field of dreams.