My two lives, my many lives, are simultaneous

Zhangken had a single daughter

As the world heals, each person heals.

Instead of Dante’s fearful inferno, I found the comforting warmth of a hearth.

Something immense is looking for us

Whenever we are reunited with our soul others are involved

She is always there

A twin pair of ever in love.

The power of the valley never dies.

I have a story to tell, and, like a birth in the middle of the night, there are no words for it.

mapping the valley

Can we put down for a moment everything but our own naked grief, feel it all the way to the bottom, and find there what it asks of us?

seeds are moments of invention on the wind

A letter from somewhere near Paradise, 2018.

… the starlight, the wind, and the sea pour through us …

it winds and weaves, I am never unbound

Perhaps it is not grief that weakens us, but all we do to avoid it.

It always is / and it is never

at dawn / still awake

Why am I growing old?

When we meditate we rest in a universe that we did not construct…

Carried.

I felt sad, but not sad. It was as if something hidden had been tapped and now the energy was free.

“You go with no self underfoot.”

He brings up the most impossible questions, then hurries to answer them himself.

Just to be in that field fully themselves, ourselves…

We let the light in.

I discovered that the road did not ask for or imply movement.

“This time I’m the fish, he’s the heron, and you are the person watching.”

…we too drunk to know the way home

Once / a towhee landed

“raw, noisy conversations”

The swift and sharp seam a bird draws with its flight can leave my world rippling….

Lush yet weightless.

After a silence, I turn to look…

…what do you do?

Wingbeats against a wall.

..a single being roiling and tumbling in the sky

We need stories that might have doors in them.

The ancestors invite us to sit for a moment in the old tales of our tradition…

A time of humbling tests us mightily… It’s a bare field surrounded by leafless trees…

Can you love a broken world?

We step from story to story and in each of these little worlds, life has us.

What is the one charm to avert disaster?

Lava is its own lesson.

After Enheduanna, poet and priestess of Inanna.

Lineage can be surprising.

after fire birds know what to do, weaving / sonorous webs

white hot and insufficient / continue to fly

A Science Guy report.

tend the fire … ignite again

Hey! You’re alive!

Boats, leaves, alembics, amoebas … Comets, lanterns, stars, seeds

…there an opening, no name… The night horizon.

A poem.

We too are shaped by the whetstone of his voice.

if it were only one / flower

Stitching art and ancestry.

A poem.

A poem for the way out.

The universe is alive in all its pieces.

Until further notice, I will celebrate everything

Praying with Christopher Smart

“Doggy,” a painting.

Regarding the art and perils of the human grapevine.

On the triumph of not-getting.

Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according to stoic principles. He died on his fortieth birthday and woke up floating in nothing.

Sometimes the remedy for “too much” is…more?

Let’s begin with everyone.

“Pink Web,” a photograph.

every molecular hand / takes another and never ceases / to explain myself

Which way to turn when beginning and end are both lost?

A new self order.

The infinite writ large in Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel.

On meditation: an interview.

Suppose too much strength is not a good thing.

Infinity? Closer than you think.

Meet Ernst Haeckel.

Excess

What if the situation you can’t fix is also on your side?

A poem.

Every path a being takes is fashioned by its interactions with other beings. An interaction between two beings (Chris Gaffney & Corey Hitchcock) leads to the triptych of pieces found here. Each piece speaks to the myriad and foundational nature of interaction in establishing being, whether the being in question be person or electron. Which […]

The master cart maker makes a cart.
If she removes the axle and wheels,
What is vividly apparent?

This is what your brain looks like on koans.

Sometimes, like the wizard revealed behind the curtain in Oz, the keenly relational genius of the universe shows itself plain.

Love in the time of data centers, virtual shopping carts, and Louboutins.

Stereo or Quadraphonic Sound Installation for 100 Voices and Laptop

The art of change.

“Water and thirst are good”: from the proverbs of Antonio Machado.

I am an internal medicine doctor. In that capacity, I go to distant places, meet interesting people, and eat weird food. In these journeys, I’ve noticed how technology connects us, often awkwardly, with each other.

When the heart opens to longing, it opens a little bit to everything.

A letter from the Director of Social Services at Broad Street Ministry, Philadelphia.

One shows, one tells: two encounters with appetite.

An introduction to Santoka’s way.

The gift of less–a composition for solo clarinet.

Drenched in seeing.

In a dream I heard: “Underground, all waters touch.”

You were so near the origins / you had taken off your face.

Holding vows as koans–and opening to your own life.

Finding a ripe and secret sweetness down at the bottom of this river.

On holding loss–and more loss.

Sometime in the 1940s when my mother was growing up, my grandfather had a spontaneous transformation. It happened between lunch and his arrival at the Biltmore Health Club, I think.

Visualize getting it.

Instructions for post-enlightenment.

Real life is choosing your socks.

Take a step from the top of the 100-foot pole. – Zen koan

I want to write a poem about / lizard society.

Ten years ago, koans began to form themselves into images inside me. From this time forward all of my paintings have been the lived visual record of my encounter with a koan, each piece an impression left after its passing, like a print in the earth beside a spring.

These days, when I sit down to write, I’m afraid. That sentence, the one I just wrote, has taken me most of a week to produce. Lately I’ve attempted dozens, a hundred other sentences, all about what making a creative move feels like. This one is actually true.

Something brought that pair together into the house. Together. Not apart. Together. Together, they came into the house and only one left. What brought them to such circumstances?

Loud, and in the dark.

A sharp intake of breath — my whole body electrified, my hair stood on end — the salmon hovered just below the surface, tail flashing gold, and we stared at each other.

Steve wants to know whether our most recent cosmology points to a dark and lonely future. Chris, the physics guy with the union card (Ph.D.), lends a helping hand.

Through a gate shaped like a bird, I enter a landscape of light.

John Tarrant introduces a celebrated predicament.

“…you are right to tremble… / for all things are void of self-nature and / your alkaline diet will not save you.” 

Introducing Deh Chun, as strange a stranger as a stranger can get.

W.H. Auden – From “For the Time Being” If the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made; If the mind can imagine tomorrow there is still a defeat to remember; As long as the self can say “I,” it is impossible not to rebel; As long as there is […]

It’s that whoa-whoa-whoa when the roller coaster, chain-hauled to its highest point, crests at last and suddenly, horribly, you’re facing vast space and a great plunge, inescapable.

It prefers the glare of mid-afternoon or the razor tooth / madness of bad dreams, because it’s a sharp thing.

An excerpt on falling, helping, and Layman Pang from Jesse’s blog, “It’s Alive.”

“Every snowflake falls in the right place” – Zen koan

Parapraxis: A slip of the tongue or pen, forgetfulness, misplacement of objects, or other error thought to reveal unconscious wishes or attitudes.

The Misstep is a most subtle step, as it’s on the inside, not the outside.

My daughter / pressed some / daffodils—

I can’t find one. / This seems alright.

Through the trees I saw Downtown L.A. at sunset with its rose blanket of smog.

This is a story about trying to feel my way into a story, the pieces of which were never lost, but which was assumed to hold too many mistakes. It is a story about passing into and out of adolescence, into and out of mortification, into and out of something like foolishness, something like light.

after we slept i felt sarah’s / lips on my arms and legs;

An old Zen teacher prompted, “Show me your face before your parents were born.” Modern biology also calls us to consider our true countenance. Which side is our best side may surprise us.

When I love you less than perfectly, it is the same.

“Suddenly you discover that you’ll spend your entire life in disorder. It’s all that you have;
you must learn to live with it.”

Now, what shall I plant in this overturned soil?

Everything I do and everything I invest in my life give back just enough to keep going. Barely. 

In winter of 2004, at dusk one evening, my cross country skis slipped out from under me on the lumpy grey ice. I broke my tailbone and it really, really hurt and I lay on the ground wondering what possible good a meditation practice was in such a situation. Then, amused, I wrote this haiku.

Uncertainty was the most disturbing thing.

One afternoon I got to witness, from a not-so-safe distance, a dance of physics, reminding me that sometimes we get the chance to feel immortal.

Seattle theater On the Boards interviews Kristen Kosmas regarding her play There There, about “being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time saying and doing all the most wrong things”. Trace Farrell relates.

A meditation on doing it wrong.

“If you want to dance Butoh, the first thing you must do is kill the self.”

By the time Coyote arrived the sides had already been chosen, the battle lines formed, and the smell of hate and future bloodshed permeated the very air.

I step out onto a tidal river rock to meditate in the shade of the overhead bridge. As usual, I fail. I’m texting a friend a panorama of the river when a bird shits on my neck.

A poem.