Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
— Tao Te Ching Verse I, stanza II

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” —James 4:13-15

Many years ago I was catering a wedding at the Daoist Center on Sardis Road in South Asheville.
I was a beautiful late Fall day.

One of those late September days,
after a rain, where the air was bright and clear.
You could see with hawk-eye detail each falling leaf against a bright perfectly Carolina Blue Sky.
A crisp steady southern breeze of 15 mph fluttered the white dresses of girls blowing...

Everyone wants the crown no one wants the virus.
The salt but not the sand.
We want the cake but not the Bastille
The front porch lemonade
Forgetting that the reason southerners entertain outdoors,
Or as “We here in the South” prefer to be called
If you can’t call us by our chosen name.
Is that we can’t let just anyone in.

What I am trying to say
What WE are trying to say, call us what you will,
American
the US
East-West
Right or Left
Catholic, Jew, or Cosmic Christ
Is that connection takes time.

It’s an unfinished product
That once you have it seems self-evident.
It comes from Soul spark by way of an off broadway play
Right through Malcom’s Mecca
and Ali’s fists, to Micheal Brown’s body.
Or John’s body.
Right through Monika’s Diamond.
It’s not an event
We didn’t know about or chose to forget
It confounds purpose
As God loves to do with our shaded little lives
That...

Those of us that work with lightly weighty things
like words, however skilled,
Know the danger of describing things most of us have seen.
Things like butterflies, love, the corner-store, waterfalls, and love,
things in progress
So easily misunderstood.
We prefer unknown things
Deserts, rocks, the Universe of God,
Irony.
Every raft of words, groggily crafted in the morning,
sails out in the evening with this flag hoisted to the mast:
Stop taking these things so damn literally!

Photo Credit: Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

One thing you must do to forgive yourself.
To set down the stone of comparing yourself to others.
A most natural of things to do. And most dangerous.
You must forgive yourself for falling in love, too easy, too fast.
With a person like Jennifer.
With company like P&G.
With a concept like metaphysics.
Or a plant like sugarcane,
or a drug like amphetamine.
When you find yourself greenly gazing a guys in their 20’s
Flush with cash and shrift of responsibility.
Look to your children, look to your addiction.
Even without knowing either personally would you trade what you know from them?
Would you trade your mad spiritual saunter through cults, crystals, 1st Century Christianity and 12 Steppers?
Would you trade your bleeding liberal heart for a mind of gold?
No.
But I confess my first thought is yes. Yet as I reach for it I realize that that is only because I am tired of being...

“God willing and the creek don’t rise.” Is a statement of acceptance. Of acknowledging that we must consider the manifestation of Spirit in the natural reality of the Universe, for if it’s not God’s will then surely the creek will rise and we will become frustrated in our effort.

We will either eventually surrender and find joy and peace lying in the hands of God, or we will persist and in infinite and loving mercy, God will eventually allow us to experience the hollow feeling of an unworthy victory we realize as unworthy only in hindsight.

At that point we begin again either:
wallowing in the mud of indecision,
drowning in the ego of ourselves,
or asking God’s will,
listening to the water,
and swimming to the other side.

The past is called a rabbit hole
And you cannot trust your former self as a guide.
Nor can you trust the rabbit either he’s got other things to do.
You may try to make yourself right sized
But still you’ll have the problem of a guide.
The question is not why you want to go but where?
Start your song from where you are are
Back bindings go from there
Time is an illusion you are all you ever were and will ever be now.
One day you may notice your beauty and not be lost
In your surprise of it.

You are blessed …
blessed to have this home and this community of like souls, damaged alike souls, broken to find God in each other, opening …
blessed to sleep in this warm, dry, bed, alone or with one you love …
blessed to wake with the Sun over the mountains your Parents gave you …
blessed to have in your pocket the collective wisdom of humanity, and all those you chose to know along the way, only a series of digits away …
blessed to have a fridge full of food, from all over the world, to share with anyone who asks …
blessed to breathe clean mountain air, free from war, and rumors of war …
blessed to have a mind embodied, able to rise to the opportunity to enjoy all these things …
You are blessed, doubly blessed, if you feel the lack of any of these. For you are reminded to ask the children of the Most High to help you achieve all you need, for yourself, and all those around you.
...

I saw the spider as I entered the shower
And thought to put her outside,
but for the newly fallen snow.
Yet neither did I want to share my shower with her,
such is the state of my compassion today.
That I would let an unwanted friend drown beside me
before towing them to the safe harbor of the trashcan.

“… anything exposed to the light will itself become light.” - Ephesians 5:14

What is light but the distillation of darkness?
These days we have had a trinity of that:
dis-ease,
depreciated democracy,
dis-equality.
Are these weeds or seeds planted in this dread season of looking,
Awaiting salt or awaiting light
Awaiting the sweet exhale of children.

We loved our children, in our naming them,
naming even the eggs our mothers passed with them like heirloom recipes.

I say to my children, money and place are like the polar bear on the tip of the
Iceberg
that is the wealth of your passage

through the light of this warming world.
She comes, she goes,
You must fear and protect her.
To my children I say,
notice:
Notice the price of televisions,
Compared to the price of food, the cost of bottling water,
of Nestle chocolates,
Notice the bark stripped from the dead tree at the...

Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, That here obedient to their laws we lie.

I am made in the mold of
White knuckled men
Who wake early
Regardless of the night before.
Precision is not an exacting science for them
Yet we know the weight of things
In the expression of them
The bones unmade
In things unseen

Bound over the horizon
Rec'ced the evening a'fore.
We do not stoop to saying what is unknown
We do not bide the time with uncertain men.
We do not kneel to anything made in the mold of hands before.
Yet we respect the work of of sweat
The debt of blood
The stain of tears woven into woolen flag folds
We kneel in offering to next of kin.

On this day
Ordinary to so many as are all our days
We kneel
Khaki knees wet with mountain grass
Chap-knuckled heart wreathed right hand
Cover them
As they pass.