I love people I can’t remember

Like Paul, Annie, & Mahogany who we lived with in Michigan

Who I only stumbled on in my memory yesterday thinking of harvesting carrots before the frost

And there they were so wonderful

Which made me wonder how many others there are

Real people lost in my thoughts but alive and I love them

Not to mention the amazing friends I see every night

Those I risk my life with

Who surround and laugh with me

Who I know so intimately

Yet when I wake I lose

And don’t remember

But I love

Put pretending to good use. It is the power we employed as children to fathom the world. Use the power of pretending now as an adult to open your heart.

While walking alone on a trail, pretend that every plant you pass tells you what it can do for you. Totally pretend! You pass a weed and let your imagination jump to the idea that it would be excellent in soup. See an oak and hear the tree say that it’s good for tanning leather. A grass “says” it would keep you warm as insulation.

Let it be that within half a second of your consideration of any plant, you “know” what it can do, without bothering about how it is impossible for you to know. Let it not be a big deal, nor a surprise. Avoid any critique of how silly this is. Just let it happen that you “make up things” about plants. …

If we reach a new stage in our meditation practice, we really can’t talk about it. If we do, the person we talk to (our mom, for example) might say, “That’s nice, honey.” Our partner, with whom we may have a competition, might feel threatened that we are “getting ahead” of them on our quest, and tell us that if we’re so special why don’t we pick up our damn socks once in a while.

It’s also unlikely that anything we experience in meditation is “real” in the sense of “reaching a new stage.” From the outside, it could be said that what we felt as a new level was our subconscious mind tricking us in some way. Even, as in my case, when the new stage was an experience of passing through a sphere where every dream I ever had and every memory I ever stored was accessible to me, immediately, all at once, an outsider to the scene can dismiss it as a smokescreen, as a devious ploy to distract my attention from meditating and shift it to the feeling of “reaching a new stage,” an act of the guardian of the threshold of awareness, like the thousand-headed monster of myth, that keeps popping into our path to make us stumble. …

Our souls do not age in one life

I have been here a thousand times

You, too

One life barely alters us

Yet you see me immature, adventurous

Then conservative

It is our contact with the body

The lightness to weight of physicality

Our greater perception

Experience

The motives of our fellow travelers

How many have become trapped

Waylaid

Turned completely materialistic

That hardens us

Why wise old people so love children

Spontaneity

Love

Signs that life has not forgotten

Its origin and path

If my words brought peace

If they raised us all to action

But words cannot bring peace

We cannot solve our strange inaction

I would explain how pain begets pain

How wounded people wound people

That to improve your own life

The lives of others must see improvement

That by giving is how we receive

That dignity, cleanliness, and education

Make your neighbors better neighbors

That all countries are our neighbors

And all people are universes

Never before seen or experienced

But all containing a superabundance

Of stars and mysteries

The little pain in my liver didn’t go away today when I thought it would. If it comes, it’s usually from eating too much of a certain kind of fat that I love in ice cream or peanut butter cookies, and usually the little pain reminds me to not be such a fool as to eat like I always eat, whatever and whenever. The first pain a couple years ago was serious and in the deep of night, classic pain as the gall bladder can’t work quickly enough to counteract the gush of fat from the bedtime ice cream. Anyway, I learned to moderate my pre-bed routine and shifted to an herbal tea, realizing that it wasn’t ice cream that I necessarily wanted before bed, but a ritual. …

The room in my mind where I find you

There is soft light and an aroma of

Possibilities.

I am surprised by a music that tingles my upper spine and down

Numbing my thoughts

The light changes

Or my pupils open

Warmer here and there

Leading me to you

And beneath my awareness l want to taste again

What you are

My arrectores pilorum universally contract

In expectation of touch

Waiting there

Being more alive

In remembrance of you

While showering outside tonight at dusk in the water heated by today’s sun I realized that showering thusly in the cooling backyard was the best thing. Then drying off, then talking with my love, and now writing you, are each successively the best thing, I am convinced. And I realize that I have successfully moved from pretending that every act of my life is the best thing, to it actually becoming true. Impossible, you say? Too simplistic: that merely by telling oneself that one is living the best life, over time, by the mere recurrence of the thought, the possibility, the becoming aware of the present passing moment, a life can actually become great continuously? Too obvious, too simple! Why, if that were true, anyone could do that. Nonsense.