Our screens hide secrets in plain sight, showing worlds we don’t understand but somehow find familiar, a cipher for mixed-up times. The numbers line up, the tumblers click. Words don’t teach. Playing does. Intuition is a kind of physics, a tuned-in now, a mysticism available to anyone, a logic never to be found written out in a book, a blackboard or a lesson plan. Real learning is a look in the mirror that makes me look again, a loud “yew” that gets me to laugh out loud, a story that connects the dots of my understanding.

Measure weigh compare think. Carry climb jump move. Breathe feel dream observe. Three modes of being, mind body spirit, adjusting to the speed of life, finding it, speaking it, spelling it out and editing it down until every distraction is gone. May I let what I have to say be remembered easily. Finding out where I’m at is worth the trouble. Listening to what I’m being told gets me to see what I’m carrying around. Leaning into what’s coming is something surfers do. There’s no fussing about it.

Action speaks louder than words.

For you, Albert Einstein

If you want to love me, do it every way you can. Tell me how I am eternal, or not eternal, or both, or neither. Tell me why I am infinite, or not infinite, or both, or neither. Tell me when I am my body, or when I am not my body. Tell me where I will exist after death, or if I don’t. Tell me what’s true and what’s not, for today and forever. Everything is everything, even my emotions have their own velocity, their own mass, their own energy. I need your help to make cracks in my confusion.

If that’s too much to ask, show me how anyone can be certain of anything when our universe of observation extends exclusively from the surface of an isolated sphere, from what we find on that sphere and what we’re able to see from just outside it. A certain inaccuracy could exist if this is the spot where our learning starts and ends. It could be time to free ourselves from the concept that the material universe possesses a center, a nexus, a place of emanation, a source of glory and pain.

If this is more than you can think about, that’s okay. Let’s keep finding happy ways to be together. I promise I’ll never remind you how the nadis and the chakras cannot be seen and that those who say they’re not there will never find them, that clocks, trains and ravens are the real and practical teachers of advanced physics, that the position of the stars can tell you all you need to know, and that it’s the kindest grandmothers who use their umbrellas to shade their children’s children.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

published in Love Love #3, 2020

The new now is taking notes

to begin a new narrative.

The new now is more than

the same old shit, imperceptibly different.

It’s an everywhere of everything

where everyone is sacred,

where each living thing is a saint.

The gift is to die dreaming.

Shouldn’t we all get to die dreaming?

I come awake to the history of the world

as being only about what’s going on right now.

The past, the future, so much of that depends

on the snake, the swan, the maiden, the moon.

I’m in no hurry to find out

where Holden’s ducks or where Bob’s roads go.

Welcome the new blood.

It has new life in it.

I have a feeling about you and me:

we’re building cathedrals we can marvel at.

We need each other.

It doesn’t get any simpler than that.