AQUIFER

Unbeknownst.  

The dark abides.  

Cool of the night. 

The dew descends. No breeze stirs. 

Bated breath. Hooded lids. 

Sleep invites.

Waiting. 

A willingness to wait. 

Waiting. 

In the stillness - a knowing. 

Silence within the silence.  Within - 

the silence.

THE SEEKER

In this briefest of lives, I  have often been alone. I know that way of being. In my tall, seamless tower of isolation. In my small craft, out in the swell, buffeted by dark green waves. In solitary confinement, in my windowless cell. Walking aimless through the crowds in the throngs of the market place. In my time capsule, lost in the space between galaxies. All I know in that emptiness is to keep going. To move onward. To keep moving. I feel the flagstones with my toes in the cool waters beneath. I keep my sight on that one unwavering band of light. One step at a time. One step. One.

SPIRIT GUIDES

There are more things in Heaven and Earththan aredreamt of in your philosophy.” So says Hamlet to his  “Just the facts, ma’am”,  friend,Horatio. When I was a young boy,my father, the hard-core scientist,took me to the engineering building at McGill where Rutherford,  the new-age Alchemist, unpeeled  the shell of the Gold atom, breaking the machine & touching the ghost of matter. Sir Ernest’s main ethos, “Prove all things”, was carved into the granite wall - as if with a little more perseverance all things unknown will ultimately become known. The principle I come to know : the unknown is so vast we barely touch the tip of our toes into that dark water. A silence abides. An emptiness attends. A presence that can neither be proven nor explained. How to  understand this? I could tack words on. Better simply to accept. Accept without the necessity of proof

ATTENDANCE

Modern life insists we are solitary specimens - mere byproducts of random chance in the all-inclusive Goldilocks paradigm. We  serve our  time, sentenced here after 3.7 billion years of un-spiralling DNA.  Love lurks as a complex mechanism of pheromones, subliminal signals & triggered orifice immersions. Our brains are complex wetware computers that create a facsimile of self as a biological safety trick to avoid the ubiquitous sabre tooth tigers & spitting cobras. Ever the doubting Thomas, I went along with this sincere puffery for too many years. One night in my solitary confinement  I became aware of a presence I could not deny. Not dreamed, Not hallucinated. Not imagined. In attendance. At all times. A fissure of light cracked the shell of my arrogance & all my former truths became relative. Insufficient. As if a match head were struck on the rough surface of the wall of a jet black cave.

DIVINE GODDESS

Binary. 

Yes or No. 

Either/Or. 

Once the question is asked there is only one answer. No ambiguity. Is the earth itself a living breathing being? If the answer is yes - is there a divine principle that radiates from the centre & infuses each & every fibre & atom of that living being we call earth? Last question: is that principle female? If the answer is yes to all three questions the Divine Feminine becomes manifest.  She has been present all along. Each breath confirms this. Each gentle breeze. Each pulse of the heart. Each ripple of each & every rain drop. All being emanates from her.  All becoming. She is always just beyond the veil of awareness. 

Watching. Allowing. Opening. Present.

GAIA

I, like you I suppose, am immersed in the narrative that what we humans do or don’t do, matters immeasurably.

A thread-bare waif overwhelmed by the sadness of the great desolation of the living planet - my current vision of Gaia. All visions are approximations - possibilities. The living earth - the Goddess Herself - laughs out loud at my intimation. The human story plays itself out within the embrace of a vast living system that encompasses the human tragic-comedy with one breezy breath.  

I ease back under the splash of the Milky Way galaxy in mid-summer. The Comet Neo-Wise is in the sky under Ursa Major for the first time in 6800 years. Seven thousand years ago, there were maybe three cities in the world - ten if you stretch the definition of city. 6800 years from now - Can you tell me where we will be? 

As Sherlock said “The game is afoot”

GUIDED AND PROTECTED

The cup that overflowed lies on its side - empty. The great bounty of the beautiful,  living earth becomes distant, untouchable. The heart succumbs to the sadness of loss. Grief.  Almost unbearable. The moment of complete aloneness.  It seems that Death will have its way. What remains in that desolation? What opens to the way of the heart? What certainty holds the centre? An abiding stillness.  The caress of feathers so light we forget they have never left. Not even for an instant. Not even in the time of our impenetrable darkness.

PANDEMIC

"Everything Changes."

Easy to say & think - until it really starts.  It has been coming for a long time. It had to come, did it not? It sped up & all of a sudden we are in a new age - on the other side.  We do not have the vocabulary, the protocols, the spiritual tools  for dealing with what is now expected of us. And yet, here we stand - resilient, adaptable. We persevere,   passionate for the transition to our next higher selves.  A new spiral for the turn of the helix.   It arrives. We know it in the marrow of our bones. 

BLUEPRINT FOR PERFECTION

THE SKY'S THE LIMIT

 Two summers ago I sat in a canoe at sunset on Anglin Lake in Northern Saskatchewan. The dragonflies had come out of their seventh moulting after four years under water. Thousands & thousands, clad like joyous mardi gras revellers, looping the loop & swooping the swoop. The mosquitoes were abundant. The evening was calm.  Male & female sought each other with kaleidoscopic abandon in their aerial courtship. I sat motionless in my light water craft, my paddle barely stirring the glassy surface of the dark water. Then it came to me. The dragonflies had one interest only - not food, not sunset, not love. They had discovered flight at long last. Three hundred million years in the making, the individual dragonfly rises out of the water. Those gossamer, stained glass wings. The 360 disco ball eyes. That aerodynamic, cantilevered body. Mother Nature, Gaia Herself, ever whimsical, perfected the nature of flight in an ancient, alien form then set it loose. The sky's the limit.

FREEDOM

For the sake of the rest of us, the great heroes of our history  are called upon to enter into the presence of death - of genuine mortal suffering - with open eyes & flowering courage. The fear is real.  They accept that by welcoming death through personal sacrifice all will change. Adam, Osiris, Woden, Jesus died on the tree they were bound to. Francis of Assisi , Thomas More, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, JFK, RFK, MLK, JL (the list of the luminous goes on) all accepted the necessity of suffering followed by certain death to open our eyes to the freedom of the true Kingdom that lies just below the surface. 

BONDAGE

Are you like me not ensnared by the bonds of cause and circumstance, by the perimeter of flesh, by the parenthesis of intelligence? Visions of the Divine come to me in flashes. Usually when the very sky seems to be falling all around me. The Creation is perfect. It cannot be changed for the better or for the worse. The rope that binds me contains me. The time-bound captivity of the span of my lifetime becomes manageable.  I solve the puzzle set before me one piece at a time. The chains I used to chafe against are loose these days. I could cast them off but I choose not to. I Still have a ways to go.

THE HANGED MAN

VINCENT: INSIDE OR OUT?

What I love about cats (as compared to say dogs) - they are all the same in basic design but completely individual in their selves. Vincent remains the most handsome, cool cat I have ever known. He is the familiar of my friend Victoria. In the alley, behind where we lived, there was a Saskatoon Eastside Story gang of assorted cats who would congregate in & around our porch. Vincent never had to puff out his tail or hiss to establish dominance. He had the authority of Ramses II or Louis XIV. The other cats deferred to his presence. He lived outdoors as much as indoors. His one foible - he never knew whether he wanted in or out. While inside, he stared longingly at the outside while making the slightest mewl. Within minutes of getting his wish he would stare longingly at the inside from outside until let in. This sometimes went on for hours. Inside or Outside... which is it Vincent?

DOPPELGÄNGER: VINCENT & VINCENT

Cats live on a higher dimension than us mere humans. Try to figure out how they see - what they know. Look in their eyes. A cat is satisfied just being a cat. No questions asked. A cat revels in his individual self. "I am what I am and that's all what I am." No apologies. No shame. No guilt. If a mouse needs to be toyed with mercilessly for a lingering while before the inevitable, gratuitous execution - so be it. Bring on the mouse. What did you expect?  After the blood sport there are whiskers to clean in the late afternoon sun. Move on. We humans are always looking in the mirror. My shadow self arouses a kind of horror. I see a me I would rather not see. I call that a 'conscience' It is really just a reluctance to fully embrace the other side of who I truly am.

MOON XVIII: THE SEPARATION

        How to describe that which cannot be described. Our psychologies are not one. They are manifold. The sun & the moon. The dog & the wolf. The sky & the earth. The male & the female.  The Creator & the Created. Two polarities rend us into separate halves. The fertilized ovum splits in two & starts the cascade of binary divisions that unfolds into a being whole & complete for but one moment. The cord is cut & we are separate once again. 

         Intolerable! 

        Yet here we are, incomplete - yearning for union.  It is in the reaching, in the desire to be whole once again that the awakening begins. Without that suffering I would stay asleep forever like the vastness of the eternal emptiness, oblivious,  endlessly awaiting the stirring of the Maestro’s rousing breath.

"JUST RIGHT!"

Physicists talk about the Goldilocks theory of life on this, the third rock orbiting a small sun on the outskirts of a giant spiral of stars. Through all the perturbations of time & the movement of the far-flung galaxies, a unique situation occurred. Not too hot like Venus or too cold like Mars: "Just Right".  The axis  happened to tilt to the exact angle needed to create seasons. A perfectly proportioned moon pulled at the seas. Proto-life formed in tidal pools. 

Are we humanoids with the bright eyes just the  random result of a series of propitious conditions that had to be 'just so' if we were to be at all? 

So curious - the moon's circumference fits perfectly into the circle of our sun Sol. When the two discs overlap day turns into night. There is a merging. There is a mystery. There is a majesty. Call it Goldilocks. Call it chance. I call it the Necessity.

HOWL

The dog barks. The wolf howls. 

We are tamed. We remain wild.

Two natures in one.

The world of the known; the unknown - infinitely more vast. 

 The moon lies over the sun in eclipse. 

Day becomes night. 

We can only see clearly when we stop focussing on what's in front of us. 

Perhaps words are not even a beginning. 

The howl that rises upward from the source. 

Now that's a song the wolf in my heart of hearts knows.

Crustacean

The waters of the deep. They lie dark, mysterious. Unknowable. A creature rises to the surface. Stirs the ripples. A being from a dream? A messenger? The eyes are wide awake, knowing. The gaze meets my gaze. The interface between two worlds. I must go forth now. I have been called out. No turning back.