Coming out

Gay Pride Day is going to be in a couple of weekends in town. Gone are the days when people were terrified to admit they were gay, and male celebrities would be thoroughly humiliated to be discovered in flagrante with another man.

Just about everyone is comfortable talking about their sexuality nowadays, but many people are still terrified to talk openly about where they are spiritually. Somebody I know was talking about the difficulties of "coming out". As in: "I was drunk in a festival and started telling people about stuff like liberation and the ego doesn't really exist, and everybody thought drink was making me crazy."

Strangely enough, it's OK to have faith in the beliefs of just about any religion. Faith is perfectly fine. Saying that you actually know rather than believe is entirely different, though. It crosses a line. It's OK to believe, as long as we all understand there's nothing real in there. It's a story people like to tell, a nice fiction. But if you actually think the fiction is real and you know it from direct experience, you must have lost all touch with reality.

People are gradually starting to come out, but they are still very careful. There isn't any good reason to be afraid, though:

There's a barrier between us,

except that there isn't.

We are all alone,

except that we aren't.

We are all together

chained by the links of love.

Will enlightenment help me lose weight?

The news are making the world look like a rather scary place lately: A madman has been shooting dozens of people in Norway, Greece has finally defaulted and there are an unclear number of European countries ready to follow suit, the USA Congress are unable to agree on anything even if the lives of millions of Americans depend on it, and - the worst of all - Amy Winehouse has died!

In moments like this, it's when you need to focus on real-world, practical things. Like what they are doing at this forum, people are answering the tricky question: Will enlightenment help me lose weight?

http://spiritualteachers.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=misc&action=display&thread=1577

No, I'm not saying it with heavy irony. If you aren't asking this kind of practical question, you either don't believe enlightenment is real (fair enough), or you take everything way too seriously.

And it's easy to give practical questions a practical answer:

Do what you will

is the whole of the law.

Do what you will.

Know what you want,

know what they all want,

know what matters to you,

know what matters to them,

put it all in the balance,

and let it all rest,

then do what you will.

You couldn't do anything else,

so do what you will.

Duelling

Recently (only a few million years ago), life discovered duelling. Two animals of the same species, instead of fighting to death, engage in a more-or-less ritual fight, and the winner will take the mate, the food, anything else they are competing for.

Humans keep doing it, though the often join in bands for duelling. For example, politics in most countries is a constant duel between two parties. The debt ceiling argument in the U.S. is a duel taken to the point it starts getting dangerous.

Sometimes one gets engaged in a duel. And a lot depends on the eyes you use to look at it:

Through the eyes of division

you see who you're fighting.

Through the eyes of unity

you see the way life will pull.

I recently found myself involved in a duel about what is liberation on a discussion board that claims to be able to liberate people through discussions with them. I'm still surprised with myself for getting in that muddy puddle, but that's life for you. For the curious, this is it:

http://www.ruthlesstruth.com/arena/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1247

Feel free to use the comments to describe in painful detail how I don't know what the hell I'm doing and/or how I'm not following my own poetry.

Critical Incident

I did my first live poetry reciting recently, at a crazy event called Critical Incident. The proof is here:

You can try to guess who in the pic is me. That's more fun than me telling you.

It might have made more sense if the proof was in the shape of a sound recording, but that wasn't the kind of record the organisers chose to keep. I can tell you I only missed one stanza and it was well received.

Do the news ever make you feel like that? They're giving you plenty of detail... but not on what you really want to know? Until you forget what you really want to know, and you just begin to believe that what they tell you is important.

Today a paper has been published for the last time in the UK. Will you miss their news?

After summer solstice

I intended to start posting shortly after summer solstice, but life had other plans for me. Anyway, I'm starting this blog at last, commemorating slightly late that one year has passed since my husband died. This is a poem I wrote afterwards:



High noon

At the end of the tunnel,
pure light.
Summer solstice,
high noon,
white sunshine.

Death arrived like the visitor
I'd never dream to call.
And she came
at high noon,
perfect timing,
flawless grace.
Unexpected,
unasked for,
amazing.

Death is meant to be black,
it was such light.
Death is meant to be sorrow,
it was sweet love.

Death arrived like a wave
washing white chalk.
All the pain,
all the anger,
all went but sweet love.
No revenge,
no regrets,
no returns.

Death is meant to be harsh,
it was so kind.
Death is meant to be a nightmare,
it was wide awake.

Death arrived like an arrow
released at high noon.
Clean gravity's rainbow,
white sunshine,
bright love,
pure beauty.
Unexpected,
unasked for,
amazing.



And this is a photo I took recently during a walk to commemorate the occassion:






And every week from now on there will be more snippets of poetry, pictures and ramblings of a non-Zen non-nun that's just a little bit too sane for everybody else's comfort.

Because we live in uncertain times, and I don't expect anyone gives a flying F about my life but me, from now on I'll pick most of my themes from the news, but I reserve the right to contradict myself whenever it suits me. I'm not going to use any less breadth of mind than Nietzsche, Whitman or Gingsberg.

Eventually, there will be a poetry and picture book published in November, Always Home.