But today, mon cher, I am not good with words. I say what people already know.

Very dark brown hair, long, pulled back loosely with wisps softening around the face, I think. I've never seen her; shall never gaze upon a photograph. She wears a veil of words.

Perhaps a blackness of cloth, but not without red. Brooch of a poppy. Toss of bead earrings, like Native American dream catchers. Or that ruby rising out of a ring of melted, cast sun, the only one on her hands woven with pale veins and the delicacy of a musician's fingers. Open her closet and you will find on the floor red canvas tennis shoes, red satin Chinese slippers, patent leather ruby red heels, red slick knee-high boots. On the shelf, a vinyl red belt, red silk sashes, red opera gloves, a red felt hat. Dragging down the wall like Barnett Newman's "Lema sabachthani," a funerary dirge of black dresses, a heavy curtain of silk, cotton, corduroy, rayon, wool on cedar-scented hangers.

Her writing, its own fertile garden, overflows with the redness of a sensuality that is both innocent and over-ripe, tended and unweeded, like Oscar Wilde's "Salome," if the woman who holds the platter on which the prophet's head rests could write. Or a mass of cut flowers in varying stages, some dying, some bursting forth; floral, with dark passion.

One doesn't know the true story or if there are any true stories.

Why am I, along with others, silenced? She speaks in the diminutive. Sarcasm of a parrot, words twisted in the ruffle of virid and cinnabar feathers, inside the sharp beak. Have I found someone to blot my laboured writing? It becomes unbearable, the denouncer's voice. Do I imagine a fertile slope for my Sisyphian ball of letters but where I don't belong, and why can't I turn and go elsewhere? Where welcomes wait?

The area tilts me on an axis. It's as if I am looking through a magnified diving mask. Only it is not me swimming but the world swimming around me. And it is the only corner I have ever been on that does this. Thirty years ago I thought it my state of mind; now I know it is the corner itself. All the shops have changed except Honest Ed's. And maybe it's that vaudevillan double football field store of everything that is a mere four years older than me and long before Wal-Mart. Selling is a circus. Thousands of feet of coloured seasonal lights never stop blinking. Lights that mean shopping, gifts for oneself or others, new things, cheap things.

Poverty drives this corner. The dispossessed come from everywhere, converging. Last year I tripped on the street car tracks and fell headlong on the traffic-heavy road. I'm not imagining that gravity shifts its axis here.

For a poem

Words
must dance
a certain way.

In continuous presence.

Doesn't the moment
live us,
if we are living it?

Even if it doesn't exist.

Fading horizon lights
as the wing lifts

Tilts, gunmetal
surge into sky.

Which doesn't exist either.

Air
breathed
here as much sky
as up there.

Every breath
is sky-breath.

A velocity of words

Flowing over
the sonic sphere,
winds of sound
made into meaning.

Perhaps I fell in love
with letters

Winging across the alphabet.

Oceans flow
into each other
like bodies of knowledge.

Are we a rhetoric of ourselves,
our love or war or loneliness-
how can what we say
be empty?

I cannot imagine our lives
without their ceaseless
expression.

The heartbeat at our throat.

As I tilt my chair back
in the pressurized cabin,

These words, even in their
voicelessness, the droning dark
on the ascending flight.

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The Grumpy Old Bookman has a review of John Sarno's, The Divided Mind. Dr. Sarno began exploring possible causes for pain for which there seemed no physical cause and which did not respond to treatment:

"One possible cause is what he calls tension myositis syndrome (TMS). What happens in those cases is that various powerful emotions, largely unconscious, bring about a tension in the muscles of the back. This tension causes real (not imaginary) pain, because the muscles are deprived of oxygen. And Sarno's major contribution to medicine is that he has found a way to treat such patients with a high degree of success.

To oversimplify greatly, the treatment consists of explaining to the patient the physiological basis for TMS, and inviting the patient to consider, with or without professional assistance, the possible unconscious emotions which might be the underlying cause."

We underestimate the power of our emotions, and how unruly they can be if there are problems that are hard to deal with: abuse, loneliness, frustration, failure. The strain alone of holding one's world together for one's loved ones can take its toll, as we all know.

Whether or not any of us have TMS or not doesn't matter. We surely could all do with a litte TLC (tender loving care) anytime. I'm suggesting that self-love, which includes self-acceptance, is a viable form of healing our own divided minds.

Last night I thought, hey, if directing this pranic energy of love to my upper arm (diagnosed with bursitus) has substantially healed it, why not extend it to all of me, even where it doesn't hurt. I felt bathed in bliss, let me tell you. Such inner brightness - a flowing healing energy, I felt a high voltage charge of pure happiness. It was like a guided visualization; I used to do this for my yoga students, why had I never done it for myself? I am happy to report a sense of inner calm, balance, and joy today. Being in love has been shown to increase immunity, so it's all good. And, if you're really nice and leave lovely comments, perhaps I'll even try a recording a guided visualization for you...

It is the end of all endings and the beginning of all beginnings. An intersection in time where the flow reverses. Where what was flowing away begins flowing towards.

Such moments are profoundly healing. The flow turns away from death, the cancerous ruin of the cells in the body, and towards life, the rebirth of glowing new cells. Radiant energies dancing the whole being, aligning with the cosmic forces of love, unity, wholeness, creativity.

Before it was always ending, every time was the last time, the future wrapped up in a ball of time where the strands are always ending. Always coming together in perpetual separation. The wrapping of the strands of moments of togetherness tempered with the forever leaving. The not now and never will be. The refusals of continuity...

The beginning of the beginning, a genesis. The flow reverses its withering away, its letting go, its entrophy undone, and enters the fearful place of the vulnerable, a fragility of the now.
_________________
I wrote that in 2001, in a story called, "Story of Angels," about a man I loved. It was the first serious piece of work I'd attempted. It shifted me towards the possiblity of becoming a writer.

For many years I've been working on modalities of healing. In future posts I hope to talk more about what I now call, Self-Healing through Self-Love. This is what I understand about healing: that's it's not about "lessons," forget that, things happen, the body breaks down, there are stresses and strains, the synchronicities of one's entire system are so complex they are beyond comprehension and things can go awry. There is no "rational reason" for it when it does. Accept the difficulty or illness or disease as a given. As Wayne Gretsky famously said, "Focus on where the puck's going, not where it's been."

Mostly what we need to give up is the lament.

The lament keeps us enthralled with if only.

Rather, in conjunction with medical help, view onself with the greatest compassion. With kindness, warmth, love, caring. Do not be angry at where you are suffering. Do not be angry at your failing body. Neither hold onto the illness because of the attention it gives you. Rather see your body as a wounded child in need of protection and security. One that you wish to free from the burden of illness. Surround yourself with your own gentle, accepting, compassionate and loving thoughts. Allow the pranic energy of radiance, brightness, healing to flow from your palm to the area that needs the strength of your loving belief. Over and over, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, let the years go by. Keep loving your self, keep loving where you hurt. Eventually you will heal; I have.

It's not that we don't want to die; it's that we want to live long, ripe, fruitful lives well into the great night and let go when we are ready. We all deserve a long and beautiful lifespan. It is with this aim that I approach modalities of healing.

To heal surely we have to suspend disbelief.

A recording: DSL/Cable, or Dial-up. Thank you for listening, it's #3 on the charts...

Tonality of the moon. The deep listening to the speaking that is witheld in the voice. What hides in the silence that isn't silent. Where the gasp, retreat, plummeting. Clouds mull over the moon, concealing and unconcealing like broiling smoke. Deep in the smoking mirror I hear voices speaking. Ceaseless speaking without bodies. Speech that speaks us. Calling across craters, without sound. Staccato choruses and turbulent underpinnings. Your laugh, lilt, the sobbing - glottal, utterance, gesture - cicada of love songs, night life rhythms, beats punctuating words weaving the coiling narrative I speak while hearing you speaking your story. Secret writing that is private out loud. The way we untell the great text we live. Under the moonlight, in the looking glass of the lake, in this silent night.

_
Note by way of explanation, begging apology: I've been playing with semiotics again, my fingers are sticky with phonemes... and as I ate the vowels and licked the consonants, I got thinking about the speaking subject and realized that that idea precludes a speaking hearer. So I tried to write the hearing hearers vantage who's speaking what the subject's speaking. Ooh la! And beside the lake listening to cicadas on a moonlit night too.

the absence
the negative space
the only space
the free space

the filling space
to cover wanderings
to put everything that doesn't exist
all the figments
and all the fears
blooming creativity
in the corners of the room
behind that beautiful
flower
pot
is what you can't see
underneath the shadows
spawn the ideas
in the absence
in the negative space
the only space
the free space

One of my favourites:

Often I
approach
myself

To see what has become.

Or this one she wrote for a poetry project. She received the highest mark in English, coming in at 89%, oh little girl (oh proud Mama). It's beautiful for me because I, too, usually received the highest mark in English courses in high school. Her Dad's a well published poet, too. She's 15 years old...

If these were your last words, what would you say?

I'd speak about foggy memories.
Fear, and walking in a daze.

I'd scream about being nothing special,
Egging, burning and drawing blood.
About injustice and theory and the snow covered car.

I'd talk about summer wind and sunlight and castles,
A butterfly emerging and the tiny fragile bones of birds.

I'd utter of cottage trips, muddy exploration and discovering new land.

I'd talk about ecstasy and blinding lights,
About bottomless regret and breaking everything in sight,
Rage that feeds your veins and becomes your existence,
Pumping.

I'd whisper about laughing till you couldn't breathe
And crying till you couldn't see.
I'd whisper self-destruction and mind alteration,
Intoxication, self-betrayal and my latest craving.
I'd whisper of breaking down and giving my heart away.

I'd passionately ramble about illusions and life theory,
About religion and everything that starts with why?
About finding a soul and defining a moment.
Life and death.

I'd discuss loving the wind, following daddy-long-legs and falling into comfort,
about campfires by th beach and flying on the swing.

I'd mumble about the hidden feelings,
The ones in the back that blend together
And the unidentified.

I'd mention being liked,
And snail covered roads in the moonlight.

How I can't say anything that hasn't been said before.

I look out
under a heavy, concrete sky.

What do you make of that?
A day when the clouds are made of concrete.

So I heaved
with my chisel and hammered
chipping away at the
range of mountains
like breasts
in the sky.

Some days meditation
is like that.

Turbulence in green
under a
clear cobalt sky

when I finished

I sank into a
warm corbeau lap
of hills.

Anything can exist,
why not?

Think of
visionary space.

Why substitute
symbolic systems
for reality-

isn't it enough that
the world inhabits
the world?

Browsing an old journal I came across something my daughter, when she was little, in the deep night and deeply asleep, said, emphatically, "Mommy, cut the net with your fire."

Cut the Net With Your Fire

I know about being entangled in nets, who doesn't
those impossibly knotted ropy traps
we tie our hearts and minds with

and the nets we get caught in
places we oughtn't be, and swoosh
captured tight and tighter
until it hurts
the loss
of freely moving, living, having our being

perhaps our years of living are learning
how to be free

of any expectations but our own
and trusting our own fierce love to see us through

I tip my crystal glass with its ruby red wine
salutations, darling, and may you always

cut the net with your fire



Sketch, Celestial Dancer III, 2003

(post originally written on June 27, 2004)