philokalia

Deep around, digging gingerly into the core of your love, the great flood of Exalt has uplifted me far past the horizon I had only been gazing on - all that I thought was possible. It is simply stunning to be nothing but naked, liberated from the vise, that patronizing vice of vengeance. To lay a rest, arrested and embraced, next to the truth of your beauty, I am both invincible and invisible. You bleed through me. I breathe you. Together, we become nothing of everything all at once. Then gone. Now done. Enraptured in your ecstasy, 'tis easy for me to see that you are right there again, like time melted. Looking near, nearly in, it is far too immaculate to deny the Divine. But in the distance, will we be close? Are we traipsing on a tangent? You engross me, your spirit eclipses my mortal idols. They are inert. But we are enabled, engraved with a symphony of soft voices and tender grazes. Fast, vast, bombast - I take you in unhesitatingly and know nothing is wrong. This moment, with the momentum of grace and love, captures the next and they, too, become one. Like our blood. Like our breath. You're my great love - the beautiful good. And when love loves hate, I know that you make confusion fuse with correction. Right. Right is that which is left between the me you give me, daily, and the you that only you can give me. Us. So the way of this pilgrim, collecting the residual soul offerings abandoned haphazardly, is to gather good in all places and to spread that substantially. This makes us closer. So close we are one again.

Cubed.

Eating flowers and singing the sails of my steadfast love, we lift each realized soul to reality of that which we cannot see but must not seethe. Oh Consciousness that catapults our cavalier childhood into that pure point of passion, I am under your purview. Here I herald the happiest happenstances your gift to me and I cannot go there from here without paying homage to my homestead. My holy. Hallowed. When this day does not recognize yesterday's aches, how can we prevent incapacitating guilt from simultaneously loving now and knowing lows, the blows of my mightiest blight? Hatching seeds in the thatch of selfishness is thwarting your business. Its like my busyness is the hitch despondence adheres to and ad hocs that ruse of ruckus, muck and lew doings.

But I know it now and bow down my disobedient discord. You pick up the eyes and set them east, like the star in the east. Wise woman and man making the lightening, an electrifying connection between Provider and provided. How great can you be when you are the Gift, the Giver and the reality of that Giving? I cannot even fathom what such complexity means to me or me to them. It isn't a mistake of semantics that me is in them. But look at that - its reversed, as if I must invert the conceptions I have previously understood. What comes first? The reward for giving or the act?

When you are to the third power on such profundity, your significance is unmatchable.

Neologism

My form of violence is the spreading silence when the internal voices are nothing but self-negating. I am detonated against the worry I wake up with - today I will not refuse to be that which is me. But before I have the opportunity to not refuse, I resist and the renegade begins. Again. If I didn't love death as much as I fear life, I may somehow learn that those verbs are only created in my misconceptions. Since I cannot conceive anything outside my concept of what is alive and that which is absent of life, I never really now if these two possibilities are separate entities. What if they mean the same thing? What if the deceased are not able to comprehend the living in the same way the living cannot identify with the dead? Then maybe those threats would be empty, benign and sordid. To see existence grasped on a notchless timeline, drawn to no knowable scale and in the middle of the longest run on, I may not waste creative space to pander my self-hatred and that denegation would be the greatest mockery of (wo)man. Rather I would wait not one more minute to make my wings the way of the majestic. The mourning that bellows - the unmuffled moratorium on mental misbehaving - is only the beautiful music that allows creation to reach out to creator in that one moment when a space between I and thou is recognized. Though the space may be small it is the only thing I can think about. It ravages my concentration. It demands my attention. It is the love I am learning to articulate and ambulate to a world I am called to make accustomed to grace and faith.

Because I create my misconceptions. Clarity is the universal denominator - the mathematical truth from Providence. I am the one making up words and the meaning to those words.

Not, what we are

If my feet are running brashly into the unwieldy desire of the ego but they advance with natural grace, then let them prance. If the mind is quick to follow, yet obtuse in intention, alight the pursuit. For the feet may go but the mind must be trusting in the unfolding, as it has - as it is - as it will be. To be after that which is after us is the only momentum to sweep ourselves into, standing afebrile in the burning torment of demands and expectancies. Patiently surveying is painting your breathy spirit into hostile interpretations and sorrowful disappointments. Hastily we condemn our failures, our rejections. We become the objects we regularly use to describe that which truly cannot be ascribed about us. I am not my nose or that noise of the noose we used to suffocate the peace that was promised for our partnership. So when exhaustion eclipsed the feet's feat, we realize we are no closer to that ego want and now again the need is for the mind's meed, to once again condone finding meaning wherever you be, whatever has you captive. After that which is after you, even when you hide. After that which is after you, even when you chide the concept of it and feel beguiled by that guide we call blemishless, blameless and blessed.

Breathe life into your dry intellect and find wisdom, sprouting from your soul. Breathe life into your affection and find love, germinating in that area you also called barren. Breathe life into your ways and find freedom, that recompense for the perserverance you placed in that karmic wheel. Good is done to you - invariably - the recognition atop of the print you call victimhood. When we are wronged, it is doubly done when we let it lynch our free will of peaceful offerings. We are not that which was done to us.

now: finding no fault

I can see to the tip of my nose, if I am ever committed to the present. I can count the freckles and frown lines on my skin if I willingly and selectively forgo unnecessary trips to the past or future and stay put in the now. To toast the tea I taste is best in light of the experience at hand, not a memory of it yesterday. No one is as beautiful then as they are now because are we not introduced to the revolutionary moment of their new birth, right now, right here? We often create identity in the inept idols of insufficiency. I am my pain because I need an identity. I need to feel secure. Proving myself right has become a favored flavor in my life. It is unsatisfactory in the sense that I base my foundations and beliefs on poor proceedings of the past. Smug I become because I knew it all along but saddened yet again because I have arrived no further in the path of overcoming tumults. It may be that I only have one pair of looking glasses. Perhaps the past becomes the future's present because I automatically look that direction when interpreting the facts at hand (or beyond the hand).

So then, of course, I will suffer just like I suffer. And no one will ever understand me enough because it functions outside the commonality of shared experience. Who told me it was okay? Who didn't tell me is was a sham, a shameful smattering of smut? But since I can now recognize that no one told me the truth, I have arrived at a place where the space has been made to make that distinction. Who holds me back then? Only me, only my addiction to abstraction of God. Blame is a menacing falsity. If we have arrived at a place where blame can sprout, we also are present to a situation where we choose our reaction to it. We oft forget how often we are accomplices to the very adversaries we point fault.

Rightly unraveled

To answer, I am labile and the litany of labels is only security when scrutiny is second best. This examining eye is happy to report a purport of expansion unseen at the seams, forsaken of the mistaken, and indwelling of the indigent of my own. The celebration of desperation is simple release when the direction is within. Yet its counterpart bought nothing but a broken line of communication and an asphyxiation that pushed two into none. The labyrinth of late is a version of the vision not undone by the downward, inside we create a secrete of disbelief and indiscreet imaginations but I love it so, for only to me of me is the desperation a destination of fortitude. Beside you, I seem perfectly unraveled and together we watch and match the which of what that comes together, just You and I. And this I love ever so true. For nothing would the sacrifice be appropriate to give approbation above your unexplainable alliance to me. So this allegiance is not an allegory of unthinking merit but rather a unending pursuit to persuade the sky to fall to the rising ground. When they meet, we meet and my body is embodied as my mind sees it. In a way of a world that works so hard to hold us down, derelict and doomed, I am emblazoned to resist it all.

fingerprint

Deep in the dermis of the outstretching hands, called upon for simultaneous protection and protraction from and to the ultimate dowry of life, there are these retes. To each end, these structures admit to a softening of such a plastic world, an asinine acrylic audoban. Undulating and underestimated, the impermanence of our existence is tracked and tricked into submitting to regularity of rogue. Under no accepted pretenses, though, do we lay out our outstretched hands and not leave a slight slough of singularity. Only one hand can be on one point at any given moment and nothing can prevent nor permit the passage of preformed, unspoken energy. Yet what if the point was nothing of a horizontal issue but rose and chose to expand and expunge the riot against inculpability to find two hands at one intersection? What if two read twelve and the skin upon skin fleshed nothing but radical community? I see the multiplicity of hands which you gave to my life as a guidepost forward and postscript backward. It is of no good use for me to deny how incurable I would be against the ills of self-disregard had I not been imbibed with sturdy and stately figures of peace, protest and patient penance for me and because of me. Although my retes are determined by design of a genetic disembodiment from macrocosm understanding, my print is evolving as to involve hands of greater need and hearts of grander know. This, I must admit, is the only reason to persist in breath. Without recourse to the vapors of the past, I see the print of others consistently considering the coalescing of them with them not, an act that is infinitely beautiful. How can that influence be the strongest pronouncement? What must I denude to allow those revolutionary retes to be real?

fear feeding

Who does decide the divide between being the fear and fearing the being? Who mistook the easy for the difficult, the delicate for the savage, the infinite for the finished? Although I prescribe the proscribing of seeing the sights as I am fooled to do, I wonder how deep I will discover the discourse of me versus anything but me. The regular and ordinary fears are fighting the mighty mass but I bore through the predicted and now I bow down to the unregulated benign nevus. Because I am outside in and in all the right wrong places for me to resist the oppression. What I admonish to my intellectual shadow is the separating of what presses and what is pressed upon. It's as if I am the forme fruste of my own perpetrator and the incomplete signature of that organized existence you have since breathed into beating. I am eating the dirt for this irony leaves me yearning. Is it irony or paradox or just utter confusion?

I am proving myself right on the history of proving myself right. It saddens me, though, to know that I just desperately want to be wrong. Wrung out and wincing at the sight of my site in this unsated stream of fools fueled by feuds of cover girl and glamor boy. Together they make not even a whole but a hole in the trap to my emptiness. As I look at my fears and note they are not the knot that normally twists in the stomach at night, I know inverted I be. But see, I am unheard and unspoken for, as if my fears were really not that special. Yet I am now closer to not being closed. So I know my fears are feeding right.

never even

There it is. My shadow and the territory it demonstrates, all I see is that unfortunate agonists of everything but me. Although it exists only as an afterthought of my choices, I can't help wonder why I am drawn to the drowning of the hapless hoppers. But what is that which is ready to be no longer a second glance? My first thought and their last word are these interrelated interrogations. Who pleads on the behalf of the beholden Beatrice of no one? Who finds the flattery in a fawning pariah? In my gut, their eyes have already demonstrated the great Division and I, with grand demonstrative denial, push nothing aside that will bring about my subtle settling in this moment of the sacred. Who isn't scared that hasn't shone brighter than burnt out misleadings? I may lead an invisible concubine with untraceable Danes and in such ruffians find the oft-disappointed offering of a wonderful place won to the wrong team. Or the right teeming of those truths we all seek and I am meek to have them. Because I cannot. Or, fear not an attempt but a failure. So I am lured back here again, desperate in those populous polls of palls and palindromes, where stars sees rats and I am never even.

Never am I.

body mala

The new year began with grand yogic interludes. My studio hosted a yoga mala, a two-hour offering of our bodies to intentions higher than the extension of our arms, wider than the stance of our legs. Like a japa mala that has 108 beads in succession, as a community we moved engaged in 108 successive sun salutation. As the mood ripened for a physically challenging feat, we sat together as a family and put to written motion our sankalpa, a spiritual vow made in relation to days of old, present and of the future as to recognize and register a regularity in reflection and resolution. I had been saturating my brainwaves for sometime on my natural, and saddened, inclination to fear people. A molten inside because of a transfixed belief that I had great reason to fear the individuals around me, this was the spiritual confusion I splattered about my sankalpa.

We took to our mats. The 108 sun salutations were divided into four sections, 27 a piece. Each round of the surya namaskar was dedicated to a different facet of our existence, an opportunity to focus physical movements and mental sways on a single purpose. This was my second mala and although I relished in my inaugural one, I felt such a deep connection to this new year mala. I cannot imagine a better way to ignite another series of days, weeks and months.

Round one was an exploration inward, concentrating on the words and essence of our sankalpa. I sensed a bit discomfort rising from me in these early sun salutations. If it was the dust being swept off my morning joints or the apparent probing into an area of personal incommodiousness, I am not entirely sure of it's origin. There was the typical trail of justification in my mind of why I am the way I am, with the similar stagnation of ideas to move on. I know I want to be able to incorporate my shortcomings for the betterment of usable spiritual real estate, yet I lack the ingenuity to make space. So I was thankful for the encouraging words spoken throughout the mala, along with the unspoken vibes of the other bodies in motion around me. It made round one a good opener, as I felt my muscles given way to the fluidity of the moment.

Round two was a dedication to the positive people in our lives. My spirit sprang from my body as I settled into a vibrant groove. With each sun salutation, I lifted up a beautiful person in my life. The movements of my arms and legs were tools of gratitude. I had little trouble releasing into the air about me the innumerable admirable characteristics of my family and friends. One after another, a new face would rush in and I felt flushed with giddiness. These individuals were in my life? How did I get so lucky? I closed each surya namaskara by touching my lips to my hands and repeating, "for the one who changes me". I felt absolutely alive at the end of round two.

Round three was an offering to all beings in the world, with close attention to those figures in your life you struggle sending out good vibes to. For me, this round tasted bittersweet. I found enormous solace relinquishing some situations that bound me to my own downfall. Yet at the same time, I was confronted with a counterproductive force in my contemplation. I wanted desperately to transfer the deep caulking of negative energy into something positively opportunistic. My mind toggled back and forth between global issues of severity and unfortunate scenarios I specifically underwent in 2007. As I would come into urdhva hastasana each time, I would symbolically release the situation and welcome something new. The round ended in a different sense and I felt both cleansed and conflicted, a dichotomy I am not afraid to embrace.

The final 27 sun salutations were intended for our personal interpretation of the Divine, a perfect way to conclude a radical spiritual endeavor. Similar to the round dedicated to the positive beings in our existence, I found my bones piercing with ebullience from skin. Each offering of surya namaskara was a set aflame by the many attributes of God in my life and the world. Beginning in tadasana, I singled out one attribute of God. In the initial Urdhva Hastasana I opened up with a resounding force of gratitude. This was followed with uttanasana, as I envisioned myself diving into the truth of the specific attribute. Figuratively pulling back for a brief moment of reflection, I came into a position where I flattened my back. This proceeded Adho Mukha Svanasana, downward facing dog. As I transitioned into downward dog, I placed my hands firmly on the ground, rooting deeply into the characteristic of God I was honoring. I stretched out lengthwise doubly as I pulled my body into chaturanga, growing in the attribute. Cobra pose allowed my heart to recognize the attribute as I passed it onto my intellect, placing my forward lightly on the ground before pulling back into plank. In the second offering of downward dog, I breathed in deeply the characteristic , waiting for it to fill my completely. I rose to my feet and began the final ascent into Urdhva Hastasana, releasing the trait to the souls around me with a concluding stance back in tadasana, sealing in the ultimate impression of my Ultimate Expression of the Divine.

I was surrounded by the divine that morning. I am surrounding by the divine everyday. There was nothing but insufficient gratitude in my heart and I am excited to have start a new year with such a countenance. Namaste.