Santa Monica Mountains 5/30/12

seven butterflies tangle
in a flowing mass
following ancient whims

i started out in search of ordinary things

if anyone is reading this:
i am enamored with this man's music and words. and basically his entire aura. one of those artists who seems to exude elusive/illusive truths as easily as breathing.

the ocean and the wave

the day does not belong to us, much as we want to possess the light, we are not responsible for anything beyond our sphere and though our sphere of influence extends outward in all directions forever we can only control so much. there are as many factors to influence as there are factors of feeling, of sense, in the world. even within our frames there are thousands of factors and they change without us knowing it. we're walking waves of change, expanding and collapsing on ourselves and each other, and pushing and pulling everything around us. waves originate from somewhere, we don't know; something to do with the moon and the sun and the rotation of the earth. aint that just how it goes, we don't know where we came from but we're going somewhere regardless. and we have no idea where. i wonder if the waves in the ocean think about that. then again the waves, to my eyes, look perfect: no grief or want or disappointment. and a wave is no more separate from the water than a mountain is separate from the ground; just extensions, protrusions, that are always in the process of growing up and coming back to the origin. so a wave cannot necessarily think of what it means in the grand scheme, because really the wave thinks with the same mind as the wave that just broke ahead or the forming wave behind, that is to say, the totality of water, one mind, one singular though unknowable purpose. i wonder if its like that with people, too. maybe it is, there's just not an easy metaphor to be made. i'm tempted to say because we are more "complex" than the waves in the ocean, but we're really not, we're molecular and random and orderly and chaotic and coincidentally here all the same as the ocean and her waves. its just that with all our "advances" in thinking we believe we can explain the purpose of the ocean, though we have no similarly simple explanation for ourselves and some individual or collective purpose. you go so far, only to realize you left something at home; you invent micronanotechnology and self-serving robotics, yet at the heart of it you're just seeking the meaning of simple things

the geology of beaches

how far
must we be willing
to go

to sit beneath
the tree
of bodhi
and know
why it grows

to know
the weight of snow
in zero gravity

to decipher
the geology of beaches?

"empty of a separate self"

a blank page. a blank page that is born full of lines, full of full lines, lines full of curves and crosses, dashes and dots, already born and waiting for a pen to unravel the stitchwork of time, people, places, and feelings, already imbued in a sheet of dead oak, a sliver of a thousand years worth of sunlight, soil, and rain, an atom within an eternity, full of stories and wit and wisdom, blooms and blossoms and defeats. clear your eyes of remembrance and prejudice and you have yourself a blank page, an open day which is a white canvas, and a white canvas is already deep with white, ya know, not blank or open as you might think. words are written before they're thought of, thought of before they're comprehended, comprehended before they're linked with others we call "words", and before all that is the blank page, awaiting the starting pistol. we say that "life will begin when..." but its already begun and going by the time we can believe we are choosing the outcome. it begins before you awake - the page is writing itself. it can be reasonably stated that the story is compiled in utero, and back beyond to pre-inception. the page is writing itself, is written, before we have a chance to lay hand, eye, or mind upon it (it is when we enter the coliseum with each and every other already-written page that something we call "spontaneity" occurs because we are all walking our very own tightrope of evenly-spaced lineage. worlds coming together, etc...). this page was never blank, always had its own story to tell, its own life bursting from its superficial two dimensions. nothing is blank. the air around our heads could be broken up into individual atoms and recreated as a mosaic of diversity and clashing bodies. the light in our eyes can be upon our skin as waves in the ocean.

"an empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance - almost dull, in fact - in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy" - Wassily Kadinsky

-


afraid of the page because of what it might have to say, and where that thought could lead us, ad noctum, into shadowy places where the real meat of life rests in coolness, waiting for the light of illumination to spoil. afraid of strangers because of what their eyes could teach us about ourselves, how they respond to our gestures and inquiries, how their response is more an indication of the real I than the maze within our heads. Gotama sat by that river because it had something to teach him, and because he brought his blank self to it, it had something to teach his open mind, to flow without words into the deep pools of his open ears and tell him more than ten thousand libraries ever could.
we're afraid of sitting calmly and just breathing, like a shark that expires if it stops moving and must devour all that stands in its way. when we sit calmly we no longer express, expell, or produce, but absorb. we have to open ourselves to the flowing of life around us to feed the flow within us. we're afraid of openness; the desert frightens whereas the forest soothes, for example. but the desert opens us as it is open, cracks us open like a clam and sucks out all the soft fatty insides, truly puts us in our place, because walking and trying to gain new vistas, new horizons, to devour, is almost futile and we're better off taking in than putting out in that space. the point being: to be humble and accepting of things as they are. no matter where we sit, stand, kneel, or lay, we are on the verge of entering a wonderfully transformative metaphysical desert, and we'd do well to enter. summits and vistas are valuable, but not so much as the climb, the climb not so valuable as sitting a mile away and dreaming of the climb, the dream not so important as the blank slate that enabled the dream in the first place.

lines i wish i had written

"So now, I am older
than my mother and father
when they had their daughter
now what does that say about me?"

-Fleet Foxes
"Montezuma"

in the margins

i've written myself right off the page, out into the groundless air, and wave my limbs about frantically as if trying to find a way to be propelled in the nothingness. it's a foolish game, trying to recall the moment when my feet lost touch with the ground, about as futile as trying to walk out in the open air. so i'll do my best to float, to stay moving, to keep from taking that fall that many a deep thinker take, into the depths of the very substance of being, an agglomeration of every bleeding heart's blood and every flowing lung's breath and every thinking brain's tick of electric current, a viscous sea that cannot be seen or heard or felt, that cannot be traversed, that cannot be quantified or codified or broken down into constituent parts because the parts are infinite, because it is nothing more than a creation of hyper sensitivity; because it is nothing, just a very deep center of the human psyche, as space equally as small as it is large. its the center, the smallest pinpoint wormhole you can imagine, and its the entirety of the air around our heads, the 360 degrees multiplied by every degree in between. ie, something that is everything, but in reality only something to the mind-travelling wanderer who makes it into something traversible, something that starts in the margin where ink ends and life begins; and that is a very wide margin indeed when fear and focus fuse into thought. but its also the smallest margin imaginable, an eye's blink, a brain's twitch, a moment of indecision when the world keeps right on flowing, and if you miss the margin you're stuck out in the formless sea with no vessel, struggling, struggling so desperately to catch up to the turning pages before they close you out or close in and bury you, and the best you can do is to send bottled messages, sideways glances and silent genuflections in the hope that someone would recognize your plight, toss a rope and pull you in before life pulls away and docks at some foreign port where people speak in wild tongues and dress in wild colors. i get the strong impression that this has happened quite a bit in my life, that the world somehow shifted through epochs in those moments my back was turned, that in those tiny yet universally magnanimous margins i was asleep in the forested mountains of my brain, some kind of cerebral rip van winkle, and when i turned back to face the glowing fray i didn't recognize a thing and the world didn't recognize me, and the more this has occurred the less recognizable we are to one another, the world and i. i suppose it comes down to security. the security to float alone on invisible waters without a vessel for what feels like an eternity, to be alone and foreign in a familial world, and to understand that i'm not the only one that drifts in the spaces between pages, that we're all just planets in space and time waiting to be colonized, waiting to collide with other planets and be broken down into something smaller and relatable, not so grand and elusive.