Fiction, music, poetry, and the occasional drawing…
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain we see a mountain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let’s go dancing through the minefield
one more time
or drift through a veil or two of consciousness.
We don’t need to live to tell the tale.
This tale will tell itself
in a language without words or sounds or pictures.
This tale will tell itself with light.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake
The intense pleasures of youth – sex and drugs and rock’n’roll – take a heavier toll on my body, my mind, and my spirit with every passing year.
One of life’s easiest traps is to repeat actions that once brought pleasure even after their effects have turned to pain.
One path to the wisdom that is attributed to age leads to fields of subtle pleasures that are easily lost in the clamor of earlier, louder years.
Older pleasures do not explode or blind or burn or throb. Until you reach a level of stillness impossible in younger times, they are imperceptible. Too dim to be seen. Too soft to be heard.
It takes an almost unbearable sacrifice to perceive these new pleasures but if you can bear it, you will find they are more profound than any other, and deep enough to transcend physical sensation.
You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough
William Blake
Antigua is an island bordered on one side by the Atlantic Ocean and on the other by the Caribbean Sea. The only things more beautiful than its beaches and the breeze filtering through the shade of its palm trees are its people.
The word vacation comes from the Latin vacare – to be empty. I spent last week on vacation in Antigua and was so busy being emptied that I only found time for three quick sketches. Sometimes even the enjoyable parts of life are a chore and I need emptiness to appreciate the fullness of the life I’m lucky enough to have.
I spent a healthy portion of my vacation with my eyes closed, not sure if I was asleep or meditating. The membrane between layers of consciousness becomes so thin that it would take a mind more analytical than mine to measure it.
There is a god and she has a plan for each of us, a puzzle distributed at birth with one lifetime to solve it. We call it life, or reality, or love, or time, or the universe, but the name we give it doesn’t matter. Words are meaningless in the realm of gods.
It usually takes about 100 years to solve our puzzles and sometimes god lets us live that long. After we’ve logged seven or eight decades of work, she gets creative with us, laying traps to trip us up – dementia, exhaustion, hopelessness. She distracts us with the deaths of our most beloved companions and dreams. She muddies the water of our memories. She lays mines in the fields of those who are best at unraveling her riddles to be sure they are blown to pieces before they can share her secrets, and as a warning to the rest of us.
Wisdom comes with the realization that the joke is on us and the solution has always been the simplest one: to join the laughter.
The air is cool but the sun feels nice
Angels observe from a discreet distance
But there is no way to hide benevolence
Any more than I can hide my love
The breeze is soft but insistent
Rest, it says, but not too long
Eventually I will have to move
I will have to return or resurrect
Even moving toward the familiar is moving on
Even with angels as my guide I cannot escape the inevitable sky
Don’t be surprised if you see me in your dreams
I see you in mine
all of the time
And I don’t know how these things work but
I indulge the suspicion that
there might be some pathway to reciprocity
