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peace, love, happiness & understanding 5/5/22
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding
May 5, 2022
Every two weeks, I put together another issue of “peace, love, happiness & understanding.” Sometimes, a day or two in advance, I have no idea what will be in it. Sometimes I find out by making a beginning.
Joshua Barnes, Alex Tretbar and Nick Eldredge recently sent me some things they have written, so we’ll start there. Going forward, I’d like to invite all our friends, inside prison and out, to send poems and short prose and essays you’ve written, or favorite writings by others (famous or obscure) which you feel might uplift, inspire or give delight.
Okay, here we go!:
A Question
A question to the listener of songs;
“Have you ever heard a blackbird sing?”
For surely there’s the finest of bards
Of those on feet & those on wing.
Flitting to and fro they speak
In musical tongues that seldom are heard,
Teaching to any with the patience to listen
To creatures as simple as warbling birds.
Surely you know of the birds I speak of,
For their songs are known far & wide
& are talked about in the oldest of circles
Crossing over each boundary’s side.
Oh, how I’ve learned from their forgotten ways,
Being under their wings & watchful eyes.
I wish my edification wasn’t so lonely,
That others were keen to learn from the wise.
I’d like to ask from where your tutelage came,
(not meaning to insult with my circling jests),
And where you learned of the songs you sing,
If not from out of a blackbird’s chest.
Maybe listeners, you can teach me a song
Of forgotten peals & tinkling bells,
For I’ve come to feel we both have drunk
From a similar source but different wells.
—© Joshua Barnes, 2022
Some unfinished thoughts I had:
Flickering
The flickering flame brings many questions to mind. Do we live in a world of darkness and shadows, watching the light flicker in from the outside? Or do we live in a world of light, where the darkness is a thing that intrudes.
Maybe there’s a happy medium, or maybe the answer is neither & is something altogether different… Maybe there is no answer.
Each thought in my head flickers like a flame, dancing around, eluding me at every juncture. It’s ironic, the flames hide in the shadows of my mind, & although they shine I am left in darkness.
Even so, it could be I’m not meant to spy the campfires of life, but from a distance. Maybe the only way of knowing is knowing… Maybe we don’t need to know at all.
I once asked someone these questions & found only another shadow & a mere flickering from them.
The questions are only stepping stones across the river, if seen as such… They can be either the path, or the obstruction disrupting the stream. They can be anything. To me, the darkness serves to cloak & veil & make you grow.
& though it leaves you stumbling after the light in unhappy circles, wondering if everything is an illusion, it still leaves you wondering.
The wonder of wonders leaves me wondering still.
—Joshua Barnes
*
Akrasia (the Greek word for “incontinence”) is the condition in which while knowing what it would be best to do, one does something else. How can such a state exist? It’s tempting to say that foolishness is inherently human, but sometimes even simpler-minded animals choose wrongly when they know better.
The salient question is why, and the answer is that conscious, knowing missteps are unavoidable—and often beautiful. I could plant a flower in the dark soil of my garden, or I could do so in the barren dust of a desert, where its blue petals will die sooner but glow brighter.
A blue little flower is nodding, standing under
my understanding of the wind. Like a dream,
death always means more than it means. Fact:
if you scream loud enough into my hearing
aid, the drum will begin to itch. How to scratch
what’s out of reach, like a bone, soul or sky?
I, too, have seen peace in the eyes
of a canary staring into the sun
forever, the film of its blind pupils
developing like a backwards Polaroid.
I think of all the disincarnations
war begets, how I have looked into the eddies
at the base of folly’s wall & found there
the white surf of desperation, mine.
Prima ballerina, seamstress, comedienne—
I have died for you as many times
as there are orange street lights in this world,
and no matter how few suffixes survive
the coming punctuations, the pall…
I’ll look down the terrible length of the wall
and choose neither left nor right.
Knee-high is sky-high. Listen:
the blue little flower is screaming
so loudly my dream begins to itch,
and death alone survives the fall
through feathers.
(for Manon)
—Alex Tretbar, from Free Spirit, No. 14, April 2022
*
the rumor
there’s a curious rumor out there
about an ocean of living energy
an ocean that is endlessly expanding
exploring every possibility
evolving into a fuller
more complex
more realized expression
of its infinitely curious universal self
the rumor suggests this ocean
is somehow the source and the substance
of every single thing and all of us
that every aspect of our universe
what we know or believe we know
or cannot yet imagine
even the unfolding mystery
of who we are and may become
rises from this very ocean
like fog
like mist
like the wind-blown spray
that crowns a breaking wave
and, further, that every single thing and all of us
will, in our time, return to this ocean
like rain
like rivers
like gently melting snow
and finally
that the currents and tides of this ocean
are a weave of perpetual change and permanent balance
currents and tides that carry us all
deeper and deeper
into the mystery this ocean remains
the possibilities this ocean contains
into the expanding consciousness and simple serenity
this ocean will always maintain
so far this evolving universal ocean
that is every thing and all of us
is only a rumor
but on a casual walk
if you happen to catch a flower
from just the right angle
glowing in the electric embrace of the sun
in that blink of a moment
the rumor can feel
completely real
—Nick Eldredge
How to Be an Old Man of Some Scant Worth
Mistrust your certainties. Interrogate the obvious.
When you think you have the answer, be still.
Count your regrets, and let them teach you.
Listen to women, especially what they don’t say.
Sacrifice achievement to be fresh in thought.
Be the curious fool, the one who bows low
while attending to minor treasures in time.
Read the sky, and study neglected things
for clues to what you have missed by being
busy with the lordly agenda of a man.
Show children it’s possible: old and happy.
Cherish the fragile, the brief, the beautiful.
Give all you have to be ready to be gone.
—Kim Stafford
*
earth the door Orpheus goes through
into the twining tree roots sent down for water
joined by hypha searching moisture and minerals
in the underground night with myzhorrium that link
tree and nematode anchoring the cacophony of underworld life
feeding giant trunks reaching upward to branches where
in cresting light chlorophyll sparks its own green drive
Ghost River
Red patterns run
through sand and rock
thin lines etch a once fluid life,
opening as a flower,
tendrils flow outward,
branching, reaching
under cacti
these tracings
so fragile
become smaller,
dissipate into desert dust.
Sand trickles
as stream,
waves move in rock,
the sound
of water fills our mind,
calls out,
first as living river
now as image,
its meanderings
evoking
a vanished delta.
A rose appears in the desert,
petals cover the ground.
Memory and being
braided into a shimmering presence,
remember the water,
the water, remember.
—Deborah Buchanan
*
Ukraine
It’s 2022, and I’m frightened.
The bottom has fallen out of our agreement with God.
There is no bottom. We’ve pulled the plug.
From deep within, some remember the code.
Before thought, before prayer. It comes with the first cry.
—Mark Alter
*
my sangha
all people, plants, animals,
clouds, stones, rivers,
imaginings
amateur dilettante
an amateur is a lover
a dilettante takes delight in things
i plead guilty
—Johnny Stallings