Number Thirty Nine

We speak to ourselves like politicians at a rally.  Full of judgments about what's wrong, and demands for action.  Nothing happens.  Nothing changes.

We carry images of the perfect self, what we will never be.  We pretend it's possible, but the ideal becomes less a goal than a source of damage.  A way to dehumanize.  The perfect self is a despot, ready for carnage.  Ready to find failure in every choice.

Seeing the self as it is, flawed, full of pain and the compensations to escape pain, is the only path to something new, and a way to the divine.

Number Thirty Eight

Objects link us to the past.  They are alive with the souls we love.  They let us travel back and forth between here and the time we come from.

The voices of my parents, at the moment of a gift -- this desk -- do not reach here.  There is no way to keep them except through the weight of every object we have in common.

I ask them to come to me -- in the table and the dresser, in the candlesticks and the yellowed papers.  Do I recognize their handwriting -- yes.  Do I see their pain -- yes.

Let me gather these things and live among them.  Quietly.  With love.  So I can hear what they are saying.

Number Thirty Seven

This is the land of zero visibility.  We see only the immediate -- to the next problem, the next solution.  And the moments of struggle and solving spill one into another.  Gathering like a lowland mist that hangs close to the ground and makes it impossible to see in any direction.

The fog of days is made from problems and solutions.  From fixing what is broken in front of us.  And running to the next broken thing, the next remedy.  The fog of days doesn't lift.  It lays in the forks and crossroads, covering all but the next step.

There is no way to see except to climb.  Above the answers and the plans.  Up where there is no next thing.  Where there is only the breath.  Where the hills are rutted with the random paths of animals.  Where the ridges and gullies could lead anywhere.

Number Thirty Six

The angels sit in doorways asking for change.  If encouraged, they tell the truth.  They're waiting to show us the pain we're afraid to see, the pain which connects us.

While the angels sleep, everything they have is taken.  What they keep is their hope to be seen.  Recognized.  They die of exposure to our illusion that we're alone.  Yet all they were here to do is teach us -- that we are all drawing from the same breath.

Number Thirty Five

The truth waits to become action.

It cannot be found in going back to the beginning.  Or the last thought.  The truth cannot be found in the familiar rooms of a house, or the emotion as the sun throws shadows at dusk.

The truth waits to become action.  It is not the certainty.  Not the righteousness or the anger.  It is not the word of god.

The truth is the embrace.  Without need or expectation.  Without hope.  Without response.  Without anything.

Number Thirty Four

Here in the darkest regions, where we can't know the truth, we sense a weight and power that cannot be contained by language.  Or thought.  Something transmitted by light.  But beyond the threshold of ordinary vision.

The galaxies emit that light, a visual echo of the big bang.  The light at the beginning, the first willed explosion, suggests the source.  As the universe expands, each galaxy more and more alone, the light speaks with less clarity.  Less remembrance.

The rock we live on flies further and further from the truth.  No telescope can find the source.  It is too late; we are too far away.  We are alone.

And all that is left is the next choice; the next act of will.  Out here in the night we look for the truth that comes from doing or not doing.  As if the light, the source, can be seen somehow in every intention.  Every act.

Number Thirty Three

The angels wait for us to listen, for the moment we are ready.  They are the teachers among us.  We are deaf with pain.  They tell the story of where we come from; what we're here to do.  We tell the story of how we were broken.

We make pictures of angels -- tall with alabaster wings.  We give them roles -- the angel of death, the angel at the gate.  But they are just us, survivors of birth and loss, coming to work at this difficult school.  With children who will not sit still, who run through the halls.

In the way we seek to be heard, they seek to be heard.  In the ways we watch helplessly while ones we love devolve, collapse, they watch us go blithely on.  Consumed with the illusion; fixing, fixing, fixing what has no remedy.