I estimate I’ve seen an indigo bunting about four, five at most, times in my life, always without searching for them. Today was one of those times, thanks to my first grader who is sort of being home-schooled at the moment given the virus. Each time I can’t quite believe the intensity of the blue.
Young Waldo comes of age, packed with ideals and oats, spends a decade on love’s battlefield, confronts the sinister edifice of romantic indifference and torpitude gone viral, goes back to the drawing board and resolves to double-down on his humanity, his mantra: “yes”…
So many precious moments I’ve lived, putting him to sleep after a long story. That sweet sweet interlude afterwards as he drifts off to paradise.
It is absolutely impossible to do certain spiritual exercises if you are habituated to an alarm clock. That most insidious of imaginary necessities. And that’s all I am going to say about it…
Every year he comes briefly and faithful like wild violets, 8 or 9 seasons now, long as I defy the clock and occupy astounded this abode. It’s not true, how things seem, that he projects staunch solitude and won’t converse. But you must approach with reverence for nature, and show you’ve learnt how human natures all command respect. Else most you’ll get is a tipped forehead and good day.
Advisory messages heard at the edge of an early spring’s rushing mountian stream, swollen and forceful with surging transformed snowmelt… Tell of what you’ve seen and know, living waters!
Westernized Neo-Buddhism is eager at every opportunity to point out that Self is maya, an apparition, while the doctrine of no-self, anatta, is an early gleaned fruit on the path. I think this is both wrong and an incomplete interpretation. In truth, the conception of Self is evolving, and must do so more, especially now. This is the openly secret message behind the radical Gospel indication of I AM, most clearly evidenced in John. There are stages of I-ness which unfurl to the aspirant, qualities shed and cultivations added. A faucet spills liquid ceaselessly in a theater of consciousness. First we are the water; then with considerable effort we may become the faucet; perhaps later still the force of will which regulates the whole meshugina. But this is still only a beginning… Happy Easter!
My solo evening meal at one of Leonard Cohen’s favorite haunts. Perhaps the main reason why I came was to figure out why I came…
[ Parc du Portugal, in the evening ; Leonard Cohen as an almost-young upstart, from his first album cover circa 1968 ; Moishe’s Rumanian ambience ; Leonard Cohen as an old upstart, performing in London to wide acclaim, aged 75. ]
In centuries recently past, but not before men’s memory, deeply haunting and evocative calls echoed over valleys between adjacent hills, under the wing of night in the rural countryside of central Slovakia. The shepherds who loosed these sounds, it is told, communicated observations about wolves numbers and directions to others of their trade. Sometimes five kilometers their informative melodies would traverse. And an art form grew from this, the shepherd musicians soothing one another and flocks alike in the loneliness of the dark central European nights. Whether this legend was ‘true’ no long mattered to me when first I came across it; I knew I had to go there.
[ 3 fujarists under a crystal sky ; Details of traditional fujara decorative carvings ; Young musician integrating an alto fujara into her performance art ; Dushan Holik, selling his musical wares ]
||skirmishes|| ||with|| ||reality|| 