Come take a walk across my sites and visit today’s Journey News Blog post for a trip into a beginner’s journey into entrepreneurship. And tell a friend!
Peace and Love,
Gaze.
Life in Ten Minutes
The Sun Tower to Crazy Gods: 10 for Today
Ever try and look at all the pieces of your life, all the jobs paid and unpaid you do, all the habits conscious and unconscious, and all the words spoken and silent, and put them in a pattern? Have you ever tried to read your life like a puzzle starting to form the picture it’s going to be? Ever place the links in the chain of cause and effect in a line (a necklace) or a mosaic (fence) to see how it all fits?
I do that. It feels good. I’m a pattern maker, a puzzle solver, and a radical analyzer. I’m also critical and judgmental, as collateral effects. I do that–knit patterns, crochet chains of events and behaviors–because I want to know. We’re all seekers.
It’s not just death, either. Some people have that question covered, while still more probably don’t. The notion of doing right or wrong is somehow tied up in prediction and calculation. If I do this, the result will be this, so I should or shouldn’t. It’s not rocket science. It’s logic.
But long ago, I gave up the god of logic. I know there’s more to this living thing than logic. And whose logic anyhow? Mine? Yours? Intuition and sense are real. No denying them. Mostly, I comfort myself with balance. Life is balance. It glides off the mind’s tongue. But aren’t I just looking for patterns again?
What if…?
Yes, I know I can count on one thing for sure. Chaos is my creed. And randomness. There’s comfort there. Neither disappoints. They just are. Fact. I don’t understand why the more fearful of us don’t embrace random chaos more.
It’s not anarchy or nihilism. I believe in order and cause and effect. I just don’t let them rule my world. My sigh of relief is the mystery, the storm-flurry of ideas, flung pieces, like the shrapnel of cogitation embedded in the skin of consciousness.
Surrender. Give up; you can’t build a tower to the sun, so lie down in the grass and let it bathe you in warmth instead.
The Eye: 10 for today
I’m having a life that’s whipping me all about, inside and out of the eye of the hurricane. The eye’s stillness eludes me. I’ve always aimed for the eye, that stillness inside of the chaotic destruction and creation around me. Some call that spectating.
But I don’t merely spectate. I activate and create too. My many jobs require it. When I write, I create something from nothing or nothing from many somethings. Mostly I spin what I research around inside my head until something—a notion, experience, memory, a line, or story—attaches itself to the research and the point of the thing, the blog, article, essay, poem, or whatever.
The process appears hapless on paper but there’s method and madness, kind of like that eye of the storm. I know what I’m doing; I just don’t know how everything will turn out until I’m there, writing that last pithy line, witty, provocative, or simply tied up finished.
There’s an indestructible, spun strand, taut with vibration so speedy the hum is silent, that runs through it all, that directs the writing and me.
But this life now, with its many moving parts and fits and starts, tunnels and bridges, I just don’t know what to think. I’ve challenged myself to do something—to sell love in a box–foreign to my natural instincts and trajectory thus far. I cast myself long ago as the exiled extrovert in the back of bars and coffee shops. What am I doing in everyone’s face, prying?
It’s as if I’m trapped inside the writing process, floating, attaching to random bits strewn about a feverish brain of what ifs and what nots—and I’m supposed to come up with something not only coherent but valuable to someone else. It’s loud. It’s jarring. Where’s the unspoken, voiceless name only I can hear?
The calm. It’s what I’ve practiced all my life. Find the core, the stillness. Be the eye.
Gemini’s Shit Storm
She says my moon’s in Gemini; I’m in for a shit storm as the planets configure.
My gut gurgles, “true.”
Storms a’ brewin’,
a slanted wind tossing Bazooka bubble gum wrappers and wooden popsicle sticks across
the stoop of my youth.
**********************************************
Windward blows the dead awake; shredded zombies moan skyward cries. Stand ready.
Leeward gusts settle upon soot-trodden lace and rusted pipe,
like predictable night crowning the inexplicable horizon.
There’s no way to tell, so breathe through the crackling wires’ electric veins.
Tear it down, board it up, and blame the weather.
***********************************************
Poised on the cliff, each steps cautiously, blind-seeking gripped edges, rocky shards of granite rubble,
a death slide or eternal flight.
A cat agilely climbs the dresser stairs with jaws in machine gun chomp, aching past windowed perils.
She studies her predator’s patio glance back.
Coyote snouts flick-sniff, scuttling to flashed fear beneath orange trees and wicker tables.
***********************************************
Storm’s a brewin’.
Pleistocene gassy beams once pocked the scarred heavens, now snuffed shut,
too, the wind tilts mountains pebble by pebble.
Lighthouse rays pierce the retinal fog, a grainy lightning chop of insight.
We’re all just kicking up some dust before we bite.
The Way of My Father (Published yesterday on Life in 10 Minutes)
“Hey, I bought bagels and lox yesterday,” my dad pipes up early this morning as … (read the rest here).
Enjoy!
Peace, the Gaze
Breathing Death (published on RebelleSociety)
Sucking helium: Ten for Today
Unfazed, tuned-out people amaze and inspire me. I want to be them, wearing bullet and worry proof vests. Mind you, I don’t know who these people are, other than my great niece and nephew, 5 and 8, respectively, who seem to be very selectively tuned in. One knows all the Ducks and Lakers stats, and everything sports, really, and the other knows an incredible array of lyrics and lines from Disney’s Frozen. I’ve heard her sing every word of several songs. That’s what they know. Those comprise their obsessions. Awesome.
Me, on the other hand, I start each day trying out the Buddha disposition: be a sieve, let it all flow through. But by about an hour into the day, I fail miserably. Something of the world–outside and inside–disturbs me, disrupts my peace, unbalances promised equilibrium. My promise to myself to be dispassionate about things, all things. I try.
News flashes and bites remind me of Doritos Nacho flavored chips. They must be laced with heroin. Probably the only snack I can’t have. Because I can’t just eat one. It’s the bag or nothing. And it’s been that way since they hit the market dozens of years ago.
My news services and journal bundling apps, I’ve tailored now to filter out politics and current events–only showing arts, photography, philosophy, yoga, writing, books and music. Same thing with Facebook and Twitter (Not sure what I’m doing on Instagram). Yet something still manages to slip in, riling the perturbations, zinging my zen upside the head.
I may have to turn to something quicker and stronger than yoga and meditation, something kick ass to calm my ass. Maybe sucking helium balloons.
I am
I am.
Soh hahm.
Not affirmation.
Confirmation.
Truth.
I shed my skin slowly.
Infinitely slow.
But I discard it nevertheless.
For it serves no longer any purpose.
I change my clothes.
And no one sees me new.
Yet I emerge from the dressing door clothed.
Different shoes than when I went in.
Eternal womb.
Pixabay: butterfly
Message in a Beer Bubble: Ten for Today
Happy hour. A hearty hoppy beer might make things go right for a short while anyhow. Maybe even release the vise grip on my brain. This tension headache brought to you by your local, fucked up telecommunications service. No tv, then no internet, and no rhyme or reason. “We’ll overnight that modem to you, but it will take 3 to 5 business days.” What do you answer to that kind of math?
But at least it forced me to work at my favorite watering hole for some atmosphere, compared to my usual, dull writing environment: dusk-lit room, dilapidated desk over-cluttered, bed beckoning from behind my back, and puppy chewing on my bare feet as I try to focus on a screen that sometimes allows me to reach the world outside–when the internet hasn’t drifted in then out. Today, like yesterday, it’s all out.
And then there’s the election. It’s worse than anything I can remember in my public awareness age. Yes, even Watergate. This trumps all, pun intended. The banana republic antics. It’s hard to stomach any more. It’s like stupid times infinity, as we used to say. We’re sliding speedily down the ice hill in reverse. I can’t watch–but like that carnage on the side of the road, I must. No entertainment. All sadness and nausea. There’s an ache in the pit of my stomach that threatens to swallow my entire body, engulf it in burning bile.
Or is it just me? I can’t tell any more. As I look into the foamy, golden crystal ball of my immediate future, cold and wet to my clasped hands around its glassy trunk, I ask, “Is it just me?”
She answers from inside a beer bubble, “It’s always been just you.”
In the gaze of the other 