This is a poem by Clare (sorry Clare, I lost the email you sent my your last name in). Here's the link to her in Gaia:

http://seagull.gaia.com/

And a link to the poem in the Poetry Pod: Yes

What a grand vision of life this poem is!

Here's the text as copied into Notepad, since at this size the paintingpoem might be hard to read:

Unless we can say yes
at that consummate moment of intimate death,
to that which is unknown,
And surrender to the
Divine impregnation of the seed of
The Infinite,
How can we ever gestate that holy inner secret?
....that which is utterly unique
And sacred to us,

To truly say yes to that unknowable Mystery,
is the bravest act of self humiliation,
and utter annihilation
ultimately sharing in the deepest intimacy
ever conceived!

When we become unashamedly
open and vulnerable,
Receptive to that which is Other,
Only then,
do we truly give birth
to our own truth..

Only then can we give birth to that
which is beyond words.....

We give birth to God.

Clare in DD

This is the story of a peak experience as requested by Sandra Jensen, for her Diving Deeper Writer's Workshop here on Zaadz:


I drove up the long dusty driveway to her house, sheltered along the stream beside two enormous cottonwoods. A busted-down '76 Impala sat next to the shed attached to the house. A colorful hammock hung between the cottonwoods, an enticing sight in the shade by the stream on such a hot day. An old rocking chair, children's balls, a chewed-up frisbee, and various little knicknacks lay around the scruffy country yard.

Ah, a hippie's house. Good so far.

I went up the creaking steps, setting off a dog in the house, then knocked on the door.

"Kali...Kali shut up!" I could hear a woman's voice inside yelling at her dog, and muttering something indistinct.

There were some steps and a fumbling at the knob, and then an elf opened the door.

Cha-ching! Jackpot!

"May I help you?"

Peering out from the open door, wide deep and loving, inquisitive yet peaceful, were a pair of the most pixieish, elfin eyes I had ever seen in my life, slanted eyes, sparkling eyes, eyes so full of life it leaped out at you and jabbed you in the heart, like other people stick their elbow in your ribs. She was a dimunitive blond lady of about forty, with a happy, lived-in face, a crooked smile and a whimsical air, wearing the thinnest, oldest, baggiest, lowest-neckiest yellow t-shirt I had ever seen in my entire life. For such a small person, her breasts were enormously large. At least they seemed to me to be so at the time.

"May I help you?" She repeated.

"I um uh...I um uh...I um uh...."

"Oh, come in come in! You're Tom aren't you, dear? Thank you for answering my ad. We're trying to put together a weekly dream class...."

And so she brought me into her little country house and plied me with tea and cookies and amazing insights. I don't remember much of that conversation, other than it was full of wonder, delight, astonishment, and large jiggling breasts, and I liked the cookies. She was so elfin and so out there!

Her voice was high, as befit such a diminutive soul, but soothing somehow, a grateful sound to my ears. It was almost as if there were a bass note underlying that sound, a hidden octave, a low pitch below the high voice, as if she were talking in an invisible language at the same time as her normal speech, a language so low it's like elephant talk, below human hearing but for those with big ears it can be heard over vast distances.

Everything about her was magical, not only her tits, which I tried to ignore as much as possible but didn't succeed very well. Remembering my manners, I tried to peek only when she wasn't looking. The house was pretty much an ordinary country house, no statues of Grinpril or Fardolay, or piles of glowing fairy dust, just small rooms with comfortable furniture and an icon or two on the walls. It did smell very good in there, of what I had no idea. But I loved that smell.

When I finally left that afternoon, soul-full of yum yums and delights, I was walking on air. In fact I almost forgot to pay her, until at the door she slyly reminded me to "cross my palms with six silver sheckles," her slanted pixie eyes gleaming up at me with that wise yet jolly twinkle. Ten bucks. Ten bucks for three or four hours with this woman every Sunday, and a circle of other like-minded travelers. Right in my price range.

That wasn't my peak experience. My peak experience was a gift I immediately went out and started accumulating for her. She would get her sheckles.

So I went down to the coin store in Boulder and purchased six turn-of-the-century silver dollars, then went looking for a sacred pouch to store her sheckles in. I went looking in and out of several stores along the Pearl Street Mall, where remants of the hippie times still lurked in pockets. I went in a mom-and-pop import store and finally found what I was looking for, the perfect pouch, leather, about five inches wide and four deep. A very old pouch by the look of it, lavishly decorated, from the something-or-other tribe in India, said the old hipster clerk. And delightfully enough, there were six silver disks of tin or something sewed into one side of it. And a perfect fit for the sheckles.

My peak experience was when Katrina so enjoyed my payment the next Sunday. When she asked for the ten bucks, I handed her the pouch. Her pixie delight is famous in my heart.

She always wanted to call it a gift, but I insisted it was a payment.

Hi!

If I could design a religion the first thing would be that it's okay not to belong to it. We would be de-vangelists, try to get you not to join. Also there would be no Hell and no Armageddon. We would not have the one answer for all eternity. Three Commandments: Love One Another; Judge not; Always use 12-point Times New Roman when you design a website, at least if there's anybody over 40 using it.

The imaginary land in which Stonebringer and King take place:

This is a diagram from my quasi-published novel: Stonebringer

 

Today here at the blog we've decided not to have any rules. Used to have rules but our e ran off and joined the circuse, so now we only have ruls.

I'm really starting to enjoy this site. It is a zaadz! What a great group of people, with some amazing ideas and very large heart centers. I'm spending so much time posting in the fascinating pods around here that I ain't got time to blog. So I'm cheating today and pasting in my morning entry into a pod of this same name:

My favorite tree in the whole wide world is the cedar of Lebanon.

I've never seen one, except in the pastoral period pieces in England on PBS. They're the huge spreading conifers one sees while the thoughtful protagonist strolls through the grounds of the mansion. And those are just babies. They can grow 200 feet tall, with their lower branches almost as wide. In the original forest in Lebanon many of the trees were 5,000 years old. Supposedly they were cut down to build Solomon's temple, but I'm sure that was just part of it. Now there's only a single small grove left in Lebanon of that huge ancient forest.

Here's an imaginary sunrise entry into such a forest:

We moved on and entered a secret world beneath the giant cedars. The trees grew widely spaced, often forty or fifty strides apart, yet their far-reaching lower branches spread out to create a kind of vast green ceiling above our heads. Few plants could grow in the dim light beneath the intertwined cedars, and the forest floor was an unbroken expanse of years and years of fallen needles and old cones, just the huge, squat, dark pillars of the trees rising here and there and everywhere, repeating far into the dimness below the canopy. All was silent and solemn and mysterious, as it might be I imagined in a cathedral of the gods.

The cushion of needles lay so thick upon the ground, it felt almost as though we were walking on pillows. When we passed the mighty boles of the trees, I would run my hand across the ancient rough bark, wondering how many centuries this tree held in memory.  The rich aroma of living cedar permeated the still air.

As the day passed and the sun rose higher in the sky, shafts of sunlight began to pierce the canopy, creating brilliant spots of color and light in the shadowy wood. Small moths or butterflies and insects would flit in and out of distant shafts, sparkling like tiny stars. Far above our heads I could hear the faint twittering and calling of birds as they plied their airy business in the open sky above the trees. Occasionally a solitary bird would dart by beneath the canopy or flash through a spot of sun then swoop and light upon the ground, to peck at something interesting for a moment and be gone.

.......................

Also love sugar maples, for the black bark and flaming red leaves in autumn. Weeping willows are a favorite too, for their beauty and because of the happy green times I spent in the neighbor's as a kid. Can't forget the Monterey Cypress, for it's hurtling shape - the only traveling tree. Cottonwoods, because they're our native large deciduous in Colorado, and for the twinkly leaves, noble shape and deeply-riven bark.

'Tis a new day and I'm free.
God bless God and thank Him for me.
No work today, a Friday off,
Woke with a sudden pukey cough.

Word coinage of the day: Falooie - when you wake up halfway out of bed wildly flinging the covers off because you just about choked on an almost-vomit. "Man, I had a hell of a falooie this morning."

Not sure what the entry will be today, nor whether waking with a mini-puke (sniglet: regurgaburp) is a good omen or bad. Not sick, other than at heart, but that's an old wound. Leaning toward putting in a quote from Pamela Travers, the mother of Mary Poppins.

The Mary Poppins books were liquid magic in my youth, spiritual Slurpees. Mary Shepard's original illustration of Miss Poppins floating down on her umbrella, toes parted primly, is the logo of my soul. If I ever have to figure out which way is East I just say, "Oh yeah, that's where Mary Poppins came from."

Too bad most people think of the movie when they think of M.P. Although a masterpiece of the film makers' art, the movie can never express the magical Mary in a child's mind as he snuggles under his covers on a sick day in the fall, with the rain coming down outside. And I'm talking about a very young child. I think I was negative two when I first read Mary Poppins.

Here's a quote from Pamela Travers, I think it's from What the Bees Know:

"Of course, you may ask - indeed people are always asking - who invented the myths? And do you think they are true? Well, true? What is true? As far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter tuppence if the incidents in the myths never happened. That does not make them any less true, for, indeed, in one way or another, they're happening all the time. You only have to open a newspaper to find them crowding into it. Life itself continually re-enacts them... The myths and rites run around in our blood; ... and when old drums beat we stamp our feet, if only metaphorically. ... There is a wonderful Japanese phrase, used as a Zen koan, which says ‘Not created but summoned'. It seems to me that this is all that can be said of the myths."

.

Wonder what would happen if I inserted an animated gif in here.




Wonder how everybody's doin.

Wonder if the beauty I sense in humanity will ever be fully expressed.

Wonder if the love I feel will ever overcome my fear.

Wonder if irony is incompatable with spirituality.

Wonder if it's time to stop wondering and start doing.