“… they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From...

I hear you say my poseidon heart is frightening.
Your ice-blue eyes see through me.
All my gems, fat-rolled, behind stooped shoulders.
The insight of early sobriety meeting comfortable sobriety.
A long way from recovery.
If it continues like this:
Meditating in silence, long talks on the phone, spotify playlists,
Bowls of quinoa in late winter sunshine …
We may kiss
And look how far ahead to market my wagon
Before the horse goes.

My friend’s dog has cancer
He does not notice and wish to document
The spring crocus
He simply wants to smell and piss on everything
And muddy his broken legs against the mill brick wall
To walk unhindered without distractions
Stopping only to notice and notice what notices him.

Nothing that lives passes death unnoticed
Something, however small, must die to keep us alive.

And this simply delights him.
Watching as I teach my son to quarter the chicken
We disguise the medicine with,
To enjoy these long unleaded spring walks
Up into the mountains.

Scientists tell us there is a cluster
Of neurons
In the prefrontal cortex called
Mirror Neurons
That assist the more ancient and immediate
Flight or Fight
Amygdala
To decide whether
To plant one on you
Or punch you- or both.
With all these neurons it gets confusing.

The yogis say that
We are all mirrors of ourselves
We are the ones we are looking for
In front of mirrors,
In the streets of Manhattan,
Skinny-dipping in the Big Ivy,
The soft light you feel
Is you watching you with joy
In my eyes.

The joke goes adults ask children what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.
And this joke resonates, I think, because so many of us are not doing what we would like to be doing so much of the time.
In my life so far I have had three professions. A hero of my first gig, Anthony Bourdain, once shared that there is a man that lives in his brain who would like to do no more than sit in bed smoking pot and watching cartoons all day; his entire life has been a series of stratagems to outwit and outlast this guy. It may be useful to remember that Tony hung himself in a luxury hotel suite in France after creating perhaps the best job show business has ever devised.
Poor Tony.

So it’s a valid question: “What in the hell am I supposed to do with myself?”
Here at Jubilee! we don’t have much in the way of dogma but if we were to lay out our creed certainly...

I cannot love you as my ego would like
Cannot wrap arms over soft shoulders.
It is too chastened, too humbled
For such ordinary risks.
For the honest illusion of separation between us two.
Yes, and our separate and many duties to attend to.
Your children, studies, and clients
Shivering in borrowed clothes alongside the river.
Me, marking time, building my capacity,
Attending to the order of celebration,
Equipping myself for a life, full and glorious,
Offering sheltered shade to bluebirds.
Pushing the floor against my shoulders,
30 or 40 times a day,
To avoid rock bottom.

Contemplating beaches and volcanos,
The isthmus’ between our lives.
The Venn diagrams offered in conference rooms
Offered in foolish explanation of personal avocations, vocations,
Defining for disquieting minds
The simple letting be of what will be.

“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” – Matthew 9:35-38

One of the privileges of my incarnation as a cis-generded, mid-aged white man in Western NC is that I can go just about anywhere, do just about anything, and enjoy at least a few moments of reasonable doubt. I can take for granted this ability to trespass almost anywhere and be offered the chance to at least explain myself before what...

Amanda Jane was having one of those no good, terrible, horrible days described in the bedtime story she read Guinevere the night before:
Her husband took the last drop of Maxwell, she was running late to get the girls to school, drop off the black & white cookies at the church bake sale that the dogs somehow got into as she was kvetching at John for taking the last of the coffee and not taking out the trash while he rushed off
to yet another appointment with his mom at the neurologist, and the Millers called wanting to move up the closing on the house across town.
In the midst of all this, one of her sponsees called on the verge of a relapse, if not already several cups in. Such was her state of mind at the corner of
Patton and Vine as Amanda Jane wistfully spied the long line at the Starbucks drive-thru out of one eye while applying mascara to the other.
“Call me Ismael,” she sighed.
...

What I am willing to give to a relationship?
100’s of harebrained schemes and three squares a day.
Alas I do not have a cot on offer, just a well made bed.
Impatiently improving listening skills.
The rafts of failed experience mid-life offers.
Kundalini up the spine
in due time.

What I really want?
Conversation and cuddles.
Someone to watch Get Back with.

What I am willing to settle for?
Open hailing frequencies,
at this point.
Bustles in the Hedgerow.

Each night, closing my eyes, the I, I know I know, dissolves
Returning to the cosmos.
My liver, done with the days atrocities,
Slips, Eve’s rib style, from my body and dances across the galaxy.
My very cells evanesce into neutrinos and spin tales of wiggly delight
In strings of time dating to the 10,000 year man and beyond …

It’s all I can do to keep from giggling
playing straight to you, Beloved.
My co-conspirator:
Headliner to Wonder.