Before and After Meditation

12/31/18

Before:

On the Instagram you can watch a man trim apple trees

And speak about how everybody has to find his way

To prune his own trees or not

Year after year, and how most of what

We find on the internet is not suited

For our climate with high humidity and temperatures

Is different from most places currently growing apples

He is in line with the same people who thought of paleo

With the man that wrote the book sapiens

With all of history--so in this

Do we need to consider what is in the air these days?

Do we need to consider what bugs might be resurrected?

What I might be meant to do is an offset of CRISP

Something called SOIL whereby I bring peoples’ attention back to the source

SOIL. Saving our individual lives or

Sourcing only interested liasons or more, something like this is not to be come up with immediately. Just thoughts at the end of the year. Just the ideas that have already been taken, like an indoor adult playground bar way out in the Iowa countryside when there was my idea of videos and candles and an old piano. Now I have the space to play, the space to make places to sit, a lead on stolen gate doors with a detective calling and asking whether or not I have photos. Who would return the gates were they to be retrieved?

How can I work with Mike Cornwell to buy seedlings in bulk and then plant them throughout the 9th Ward. Along those lines, what is the best way to begin planting citrus? In the shade of oak and hackberry trees? What other symbiotic relationships might take place? What about burning all of this cat’s claw and then taking the bulb as medicine? Is this tortured earth trying to save itself and us at the same time.

This is how this works, the same as when I realized that the pomegranate tree was using me to accelerate the spread of its species. I was listening to the British guy, Tony Parker maybe, even more nondual than Nisargadatta (a very dualistic proclamation!)...maybe I will have to ask Ben Shea.

There is a way that there can be organized chaos in the spread of all that is around us. This starts with a board, a group of people making decisions together about where and when to plant, a group of people that believe in letting the chickens work for us and then collecting their eggs.

Quinn’s Coops: Buckin’ Eggs.

That would be how we honor the young man caught in the trap. How to keep the space alive and well as Tank said while it continues to change, while more white people with money come. Carry the stories. Carry the water. Chop wood. Who would still be there to be interviewed? Why should my house be home base? What trees could be planted and where? When you see the life cycle of a butterfly and realize the connection between this and the inside tube of a toilet paper roll, then you will be forgiven.

To read Ross Gay and finally decide where Dad’s ashes should be spread

To carry fireplace ashes 1600 miles and descend

To bake macaroni only for a side dish because you have learned

The proper way to say pecan is out loud, but in the land

Of the praline, time knows no bounds when the trumpet sounds

And the chorus begins and everybody sings: I’ll be glad when you gone

You rascal you, and everybody knows all this is in jest

Laughter sits on the fence of sadness and unlocks the gate

Love lies wait in the waist of a worker bent to lift

A sprig of grass knows only the future beneath a breath of snow

The wild wondrous worm reaches out and splits herself into

Thoughts not body, thoughts not pain, thoughts not contained

In any prince there is the dive of division and the need for

Control, an omen lifted first from the druids, lifted first

For the fortunes of the boats without sails, lifted

to the treetops we risk like the mighty squirrel

Perched with the purpose of tracking each fallen nut

In the U.S., we call this a census, sometimes the House

Sometimes the Senate, certainly the president.

Twelve thirty-one. Eighteen

You are almost gone now--you have left behind many opportunities

So we as your subjects, as your grand denizens of the earth

Sit with a part of us ground and the rest in heaven, letting lower

Lights light light, lyres of song from oft wrong soldiers of long ago

Searching for the words meant for Muses to send-able only to receive by sitting

To trim an apple tree, to cut the branches, to be nature’s servant

To take the inside of a toilet paper roll and realize how this may

Create a butterfly. To know this.

After:

Should not the mind be clearer after sitting

In silence for twenty minutes and now

Blood running through calves, legs alive, tingling

Sensation in the shoulders, spread love to spots of pain

If in the body, then in the entire collective body

If able to shift and shape pain through thought and movement

Why not rely on this to change the consciousness of the world

The tissue through which a butterfly is created

This is what is missed: the realization that every action

Changes the world irretrievably and there must be a way

To end words and lines in verbs and prepositions arranged in a different manner

So as to start lines that pull you back to the previous

Line and forward. March. To the present. Now to the

Next order of business is witnessing the way you always remember

Ross Gay and Eminem, hashtagging the two of them, hashtagging

The spirit of Thomas Lux may have stayed on this earth longer

Were it not for the very things that drew me to him those nights in Prague

He asked Amanda Troxler why women always seem to go for the worst ones

Meaning me, and then said he would never let me meet his daughter

So here I sit almost twelve years later, at my mother’s kitchen table

Alone, thinking of ants in a sugar bowl, thinking of what Tom’s daughter looks like

Thinking of how I might tell her about his kindness and patience toward me.

What must it have been like to have given a drunken poet a summer schlorship to Sarah Lawrence only to have him show up sober and with a desire to stay sober?

Take the limes and the coconuts and let mistakes be choices that you were not aware of before you made them: the muses will come into the editing room as well, but the muses will not sit unless first you do.

So you raced the clock nearly everyday in the year 2000. What if?

You write a letter to that Zach twenty years before. Each day you read what was written

At the turn of the millenium and then discuss what you know now

Then the answer was in words. Now the answer is in silence

Then the answer was whiskey and women

Now the answer is worms and a word with “w” that will not come.

Not will. Not wisdom. Wonder might suffice.

Yes, wonder. Worms and wonder. Worms as the intestines

Of the earth we have left with the concrete blocks that block us from us

If this is the truth, should there not be a way that I can set aside my judgement

to make a living, a way that I can take my passion for the earth and for service

and for the way that death becomes life

and take this to make a curriculum that addresses the entire child.

It will be up to me to write this. It will be up to me to ask others what they think and seek help and realize the many different ways that are right before our eyes,

the ways to take a green papaya and moringa

And change the life of a child,

the way to let the chickens work with what is left from every restaurant in the neighborhood.

If you keep writing about the same things over and over then this means that is where you should be. Do not seek out the end, but have an idea. Have a way that places worth before money, a way that considers life before self, and even though self is a part of life, seeking to serve self first will only destruct self. These are only words. God sent the messengers. God sent David Wiss to discuss health and sobriety and maybe all of this is coming together for a small cabin on CRISP where alcoholics can live in the beginning, where they can get reconnected to the earth, serve the worms SERVE THE WORMS and thereby reenter into a place from which they only believed that they were separated.

A sip of coffee and a thought about second thoughts

A far flung symphony bent down beside

The gutter where the leaves collect and all we see

Is the sewer of neglect failing

To witness the system’s anomalies-

Along the curb, waste creates life.

Take now the flesh and mimic the way nature

Turns rubbish into a gift, and then realize

Rubbish is a concept in the mid of man

A setting sun prophecy that setting sun people make

Each day. A realization can take place

There are no setting sun people

Only setting sun egos. Only resting warriors

Only blinded allies and corporate lawyers

Make sense of the constables and other unnecessary words

And herd together divinity.

Manifesto

I

The hardest part of writing a manifesto is the first sentence. Next is the difficulty of pinpointing exactly what you want to say. With the former finished and the latter never known, let's move ahead and begin with this: we heal together, the earth and the people, for we were never separate.

In this nation, pain runs through the DNA of every person born on domestic soil. The children do not know this. Each morning, Steven came to me and asked if he could water the garden outside our classroom door. Administration called him autistic. I found him interested. Why does a carrot have a green top and an orange bottom? Why are there ants in the garden? He brought me the remains of a dragonfly and asked why we could see through the wings. He brought me seeds. He brought climbing pink roses that we kept in a peanut butter jar filled with water.

Native Americans found meaning in all beings. They honored the life within every form. A dragonfly, born in water, takes to the air to teach us about change and adaptation. They buzz above us to illuminate illusion. If only I could have given Steven these words. Instead, I said something simple like the wings are that way for the same reason he loved to watch water become a rainbow on its way out the can.

This manifesto is for Steven. It is for the times when the other students wiped their hands on each other and said that they had "Steven germs". It is for the times that kids refused to sit in his desk. It is for the time I didn't see his hand raised and he had to sit in his own pee. It is for the hug he gave me every morning.

I want you to know this, Steven, that much of what we see is an illusion, and that most of those that call themselves adults are confused and we know not what we do. But do not fret, for deep within each of us is a voice that asks, "Why can't I stop thinking like this?" This is the witness. This awareness is the beginning of change.

This manifesto is for you. The reader. A candle in a dark room. An appeal to the divine that exists beneath what you believe separates you from me and each other.

So before we go any further, let's stop to say for ourselves:

May you be at peace.
May your heart remain open.
May you awaken to the light of your true nature.
May you be healed of all things.
May you be a source of healing for all beings.

And let us now take one minute and think of a being that has meant something to us, that has offered love, be this a pet or a tree or an Uncle with a bad hip.

Offer this:

May you be at peace.
May your heart remain open.
May you awaken to the light of your true nature.
May you be healed of all things.
May you be a source of healing for all beings.

In the life of every man, woman, and child there exists one or more people believed to be the cause of pain. We struggle with these people, for the ego separates us from them. This manifesto will get subterranean.

For now, say these words while considering one of those persons:

May you be at peace.
May your heart remain open.
May you awaken to the light of your true nature.
May you be healed of all things.
May you be a source of healing for all beings.

II

I must ask, "Am I writing to confirm what I think I know? Or am I writing to learn something new?" I would ask you to consider why you read. When you buckle against what has been written, pause, and consider why this is. When my sense of who I am is threatened, I attack. My Western mind craves certainty.