Her Autumn Season

Old autumn sways inside her cool wool sky. Her branches cross. Fiddle like fingerprints circling their blessings. They know how to root a heart in place.

Through her eyes brown driftwood appear like two kind pieces, floating by, barely remembering their miles or the trunk which grew them.

But she is filled of old sweet bones, memories seeping like sugar maple sap: every quiet held sunrise, when she rocked sound back to sleep, year after year, against the softening cotton of her nightgown. Plumes of old familiar recipes lifted out with hot oven mittens around a family of hands: reaching, working, taking, giving back. Cupboard winters lined with glass garden rows in a dark cement basement. Every season - lengthening. Yet, every season - enough. Because she told them so.

Hope is always greater than loss. Life sounds like laughter and looks like prayer. This she reminded them, humming her wisdom. Dancing her mistakes.

Summer driveways beneath a dusk blanket. Awaiting the engine switch of life departing. Then another, then another. Her long porch listened deeply for a day's return. She knew the good ones always come back. And did they ever.

She laughed wildly, lived preciously. Made them each a life of matter with her bare knuckles and compassion. Tied so many shoestrings of love together that they buried themselves under her, came up breathlessly to try and love the same. When they couldn't, she loved them greater. So they would remember how.

They watched as her faith created patterns of circles inside their generations. Her smile was an everyday reminder that she did not live to prove it.

Her driftwood eyes float over and over, like seasons. October breezes scatter her across a thin riverbank. Still, her old sweet bones. They hold much more than her autumn expression. They have been carving her own way back. Into a thick trunk, to its deep roots. Into every changing leaf, falling. Into every last leaf to come.

Ode to the Apple

There's no doubt that living breathing legends exit the earth the same way the rest of us do. Some, painfully, some painlessly. Perhaps what is left unsaid, greater than what is left undone, becomes the more painful element of loss, for the one who is going and for the ones who remain, because we're remarkably aware that saying something actually costs us nothing - except, perhaps, a swallow of our pride, a bit of forgiveness, one long fell swoop of acceptance, maybe; and in that case, no one can ever quite be sure what muddles below on either side of life's coin except those left holding their tongues. I don't know. I don't have enough experience with loss to know much about anything, really.

But there's something strangely affective about Steve Jobs' death. Maybe it's because the artifacts of his life's contributions blink alive vibrantly, metamorphically, inside our pockets, inside our strung together world, inside our habits. There's literally a physical connection a billion people have around the world to a man's inner genius. Granted, great people die everyday; most of us have no close personal affection to the late Tocqueville, or Edison, or King, despite the dents they too made on the universe. And maybe the lesson of Jobs' death is of no greater value than anyone else's. Thinking of an angel like Mattie Stepanek, a messenger of God's love, and then thinking of Steve Jobs, I wonder - maybe less of life is about how many people we reach and more of it is about how deeply we reach just a few. The judgment isn't ours to make, either way. But undeniably, every messenger needs a medium; Jobs built us a few pretty damn good ones. Yet, we cannot quite commemorate the death of someone who built an unmatched empire of innovation with a missing pillar of philanthropy and believe that the worth of his life means more than that of the man, and woman, and child who passed away the very second after he did.

Still, I find it's just too stirring a moment to not reflect upon - to watch possibility die and live at the very same time. One man does not stop the world; the world does not stop for one man. No matter how powerful, rich, bad, good, or transformative. We're each just a blink of God's eyelashes. Ideas will flower, change will come, innovation will burst through the seams of our world, for good and awful, and by faith, neighborhood, and humanity, people will persist and resist the nature of history - that it is both controlled by us and controlled by no one. It is the complex, simple design of God no one has figured out. And definitely, not by Steve Jobs, or else he would have controlled his fate, I can assume, for a little while longer.

This is just a rambling, really, to maybe arrive at the emotive estimation that we cannot all have the same impact on the world like Jobs did. But in terms of making a dent on the future universe, I think it causes me to pause, longer, to redefine where my universe is, and who lives in it. What needs to be done, what needs to be said? Undoubtedly, we all have something more to say, so, what is it? Maybe I think of Jobs as one of those unbridled folk who said what he needed to say, and loud enough for the outer limits of his own small part of the universe to hear him. From a distant ariel view, you could say we all just get one long day, one fat chance, to do just that. Jobs was 56, Mattie was 13, I am 30, so I guess not being able to find the time or overcome the fear are just terribly lazy excuses for not living like we're going to die at some moment between now and then.

In my recent unpredictable oddities, I wrote a short jingle for Apple on my way to Mystic, CT (seriously, who thought I'd accidentally join the ranks of Uncle Jesse/Uncle Joey). Maybe it's because we had just been given an iPad, our first Apple device, a few days prior, and maybe the funny joy I felt for owning a small piece of the spectacle made me do it. Maybe because those dang catchy tunes of theirs stick the roof of our daily hum like peanut butter, so I thought maybe I'd try humming my own, and then, teaching it to my kids so I could hear the funny sound of someone singing your song. I don't really know, but anyways, I think it's only appropriate to throw it out into the universe, because, why the hell not.


Ode to the Apple

Circle your dancing finger with mine
'round the world seven times c'mon and play
Shout to the clouds "Open up the orange sky
the day ain't done there's something more we want to say"

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, LOVE

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
We all got something more to say

Peel back our wings we're all kind of strange things
Who fly and try the hocus pocus of our dreams
You might float there and I may be here
But we'll find each other somewhere in the air

Then say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey
Love love love
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, LOVE

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
We all got something more to say
We all got something more to say.

photograph

A timeless beckoning to
abandon all this for a while.
Follow its faint glow and come -
live inside, here, with our eyelashes
stopped.

The matter of before and after
press no hard weight on this
a delicate specimen
its breath spliced from air and a moment.

Yes, come to this discrete in-between
pausing what is before it nearly never happened.
Gold fleck of wing turned inside out.
A firefly struck fleeing, flashing its small life inside the dark.
There - and there - and there.

Intricacy distilled from gravel night
by itself in a dusty container punctured, pixelated
just in case. Just in case.

Maybe it will under this curious lamp, here.
Our two eyes twist open, cup remnants of life, gently.
We press our funny hope inside to feel
fire come alive.
Fluttering shadows bring: joy, tears, love, forgiveness.

And we discover after all this still time
its original wonder yearning
through holes and years
to be kept again. And again, and again.
Even, there. Whoever that may be.

Tiny flicker of fortune.
A firefly never flees from what it knows:
to be held it must be captured.

A micro philosophy on self-knowing

For a great most of us who occupy a small space of this world at one time or another, we justify it wholly acceptable yet restlessly unsatisfying to continue living just as we do. At least, this is a valid question of self-meaning that emerges at some bold moment during our lives, and for some, throughout our lives. This is because we, at least I, have lived a life of half-intentions, unrequited dreams and part-way glances, meeting the selves of others halfway and my self nearly not at all, at least, the deep parts of me that matter. We find discomfort in too long gazes and too short looks but stare just enough into others to run a mental algorithm, after a few exchanges, or even fewer encounters, to decide where on the value scale they fall in reference to our own, or to our family's, or to our morality's, and so forth. And therefore, treat them as such, as though appearance, preclusion of traits, occupation, accent, inherited wealth, or poverty, or all other habits of things that become formulations of value to us; we offer our own selves capable in that instance to determine what comparative relation we have with them, and they to us, which of our vectors align, or intersect, or run opposite, at least the ones we care to measure and discriminate, and that this becomes the conditional nature of how our human relationships take form. Or never do.

The in-between of too short and too long is a mechanical protective narration we follow; to never fully stay too long or go too deep for fear of what will be revealed. We find impermeable unchallenge to the habit of socially constructed human transaction - to manage superflous introductions or conversations as a polite follow-up to our pre-determinations, or in hopes that the person will do something, say something, that leans them more favorably to our judgment, and as well, leans us towards theirs. It is difficult for any one of us to just be, and this I think is true for some if not most. But not for all, however, because there are those rare humble earthstones who deliver only what they have to offer, typically a small open box with not much inside. They arrive on the doorstep of every conversation saying,"Hey, it's all free, and I don't mind if you don't take a thing." Many more of us claim this category than who should. In fact, the paradox of humility almost prevents such knowing.

That we may never completely know if others say what they mean or do as they believe, if their beliefs are deeply rooted or an accident of erosion; we do not know, but in any case, we find easily our gavel of judgment. We know about this judgment thing well, very well, in fact, because we are secretly guilty of the exact incrimination we graft upon the world.

Greater than the laws of science and experiment, it is necessary to place ourselves under the microscope of our own barrage of questions to carve a meticulous form of self-fact from the rigorous exercises of deduction and discovery and devices of all things inward. This is a type of necessary absolution, that is, to meet our eye with as much whole courage as we have wholly lacked, and finds no respite invitation in our social discourse, because eh, yes, the discourse means we talk less about each other and only of ourselves. What an awful, obscene proposition; to require those of us who hover stealth opinions about everything unrelated to our own deep selves to produce a handful of self-facts and some genuine vulnerability to prove it. Many of us have no ill intention by it; others, yes, but ill intended or not, the unknowing is quite the same.

For this I have no answers. Why is it that we are unafraid to wield analysis to all outer extremities - of governance, of community, of enemies, of lovers, and friends, and even complete strangers, of which we have exact and often extreme opinions. But to the facts of ourselves, we find we have very few, and even of those we would rather not be tested. Why is this? Why are we so afraid to know better the only inner creature we are given, to become more than merely acquainted with ourselves, to offer that peculiar stranger within more than small conversation during infrequent quiet moments, or retort with continuous doubt at her attempts of expression. This is what I do not understand, either of myself or of anyone guilty of the same charge. That is, we misuse the same incomplete application of algorithm against our self as we do against others, and by consequence, our self-knowing joins the army of our inaccuracy that predominates how we understand and participate in this world; indeed, not as wildly and fully as we should.

The entire lesson is God; He does not give the lesson but rather is The Lesson. This I believe. I also believe God plants seeds of wisdom where we can reach them, and perhaps, with which to feed our souls. One simple lesson, then, might arise as wisdom from the infant generation. This is the distinctive charm of children: they find no fear or haste in staring into us for long periods of time - listening, observing, absorbing the ordinary magic we have to offer. Children make us feel magical - they beckon to the surface those childish qualities of ours, and emerging with their permission are those parts of us that are unpolished and unfascinating and nonsensical; the parts of us that wish had a place in this world to belong. Perhaps we must, as they do, ask simpler questions and accept simpler answers. Of ourselves and of each other. We may find that we have far fewer answers than we claim to know, about others and the world, and of course, about ourselves. We may find fluidity in our self nature. Within this fluidity is time, space, courage, and openness to learn new things without feeling threatened or chained to something former or too stubborn to become something untried. Outside of this fluidity is where we, satisfied or not, reside. Children, thankfully, live inside this fluidity. Children accept. They emit joy when it's in them, they listen, or they don't listen and ask another question, then another, and yet another; they cry when they must and dance when their hearts sing; they move, they do not dwell. And in that freedom lives their natural forgiveness of all things, and their inability to judge us because - they have not yet learned what it is to judge themselves, as least not yet.

Therein is the absolution, the magical overture, of how we may lay aside the complicated persona and simply become the person.

Life Observation # 5

One privilege of privilege is bitching about it.

My Problem

I have no problem with
self-condemnation, except
how often I have to hear it.

Brilliant!

"Not I said the fly."
"Not I said the fly."

How ridiculously stupid is that.
I could have written the same folksy forays

little jiggity jigs making

millions of children laugh
the whole world over
through the decades.

Although,
I tried to delight
just two today and

failed miserably.
Neither one of them laughing
nor I, for that matter.

So I settled with

"Not I said the fly."
"Not I said the fly."

Then laughed hysterically
at the satire.