04

I feel sorry for whomever it is
keeping me company--
keeping us company--
as an inner presence,
as our best invisible friend,
on our way through our life.

That is the presence 
that keeps giving us tips,
hints, nudges...
that works to wake us up
and turn us toward the light,
and we keep doing
the Adam and Eve thing,
listening to the wrong input,
ignoring the right ways
of doing what needs to be done.

I apologize all of the time.

I don't know how it works,
if they draw lots,
flip coins,
pick a number...
or how our Riders feel about
being along for the ride with us,
but if we all come back 
as Riders--
as mute/nonverbal Riders--
with someone else doing the driving
and making the choices
while we scream soundlessly
and point uselessly
in the opposite direction,
I hope we remember how we treated
our Rider
and note how it's all coming back to roost,
shaking our head
and wondering where it goes from here.

–0–

03

We are birthing one another here,
growing each other up,
waking each other up,
helping each other find our life
and live it.
To know what needs to be done
and do it.

That's all there is to it.

What are we missing?
What are we not seeing?
What are we ignoring?
In the rush to find our way
and have it?

The trick is to forget
finding our way
and having it.

Our work is to see what 
needs to be done
and do it.

In each situation as it arises,
all our life long.
"Nothing to it but to do it"
(Maya Angelou).

Listen to the woman!
Do what she says!

–0–

02

We are here to bring ourselves forth,
to bring ourselves to life,
to birth ourselves into the life we are living,
and to assist others 
in their own birth process.

We are here to give birth to ourselves,
one another
and the entire world.

The way to not do that is 
to concretize the metaphor.

We are always factualizing our symbols.

The Right To Life 
as an anti-abortion movement
kills life in the name of saving it.

It values the actual, literal, 
life of a fetus
over the symbolic, metaphorical,
and even actual, literal,
life of the mother.

Some anti-abortion Catholic priests
rail against using fetal tissue
in medical research that gives life
to thousands of people.
They kill in order to save.

The symbolic/metaphorical aspect
of giving birth,
of bringing to life,
makes mothers of us all.

We all are,
each of us is,
eternally involved in birthing ourselves
and one another--
in terms of waking up
and entering fully into the wonder/joy
of being alive to the fullness,
depth, height, breadth of life
on all levels,
in all dimensions.

And we do that by dying,
metaphorically/symbolically,
again and again
in growing up against our will,
in waking up against our will,
in being living examples
of the spiritual truth
that going with the flow
means swimming against the current
and going against the grain.

The paradoxes,
ironies,
contradictions,
opposites,
dichotomies,
contraries,
polarities...
of life 
have to be recognized,
embraced,
lived,
suffered,
borne,
danced with
and affirmed
with every breath
and heartbeat.

Life eats life.
In order for us to live,
something must die.
And we have to sway "Yea!"
to life as it is--
to the way of things as they are!

Which is, itself, a kind of dying
in order to live.
In order to be who we are,
doing what is ours to do.

We sacrifice ourselves on the altar
of our own becoming
every day.

Growing up is waking up
is dying, dying, dying
again and again
all our life long.

Those who don't do that
die a different kind of death,
and are even more dead
in a "Leave the dead
to bury the dead," kind of way,
than those who do it,
bearing the pain/anguish/agony
of being alive
and paying the full price
of being alive
all along the way.

Metaphors and symbols 
have to be living,
vibrant,
throbbing,
vital referents to truth
that cannot be said,
explained,
told,
defined.

We live to die,
we die to live.

"Death and resurrection, Kid.
Death and resurrection!"

It is our place to understand 
what this means,
and live it out,
consciously,
intentionally,
deliberately,
each day,
all our life long.

–0–

01

We are here to live well
and pass it on.

Living well comes down 
to doing what is ours to do
and what needs to be done
in each situation as it arises
with the gifts that are ours to share
all our life long.

We live to find our life and live it,
and pass that on 
to everybody who comes our way,
helping them to find their life and live it.

Part of finding our life and living it
is knowing/noticing what symbols/metaphors
attract us,
attach themselves to us,
call our name,
keep popping up,
won't leave us alone...

These are our helpers,
our aids,
our guides.

Our place is to be right about
what our symbols/metaphors--
which choose us more than we choose them--
are referring to.

What do they have reference to?
What do they stand for?
What do they mean?
What do they mean for us?

One of my symbols is a keyboard,
another is a camera.
Both are about seeing and saying.
I'm here to see and to say what I see.
So, I am to do that consciously,
intentionally,
deliberately,
with awareness and grace,
compassion and kindness.

Gerard Manley Hopkins said,
"What I do is me/for that I came."

He said that to all of us,
for all of us.

Our place is to know/find 
what is ours to do
and do it.

That is why we came,
what we are here for.

That is living well.

Passing it along
is helping/assisting other people
in knowing/doing that themselves.

Another of my symbols is
a stream on the way to the sea.

Streams are everybody's symbol.
We are a stream
on its way to the sea.

"The stream doesn't force its way,
the stream finds its way,"
is an old Taoist aphorism
about living in, 
and abiding by,
in accord with 
the Tao, the Way
in our own way,
as only we can do it.

What is The Way?
What is our way?
We live to find out--
to know and to do--
these things.

For that we came.

03

The people who say,
"Nothing matters!"
say it in a way 
that suggests
it matters that nothing matters.

What matters, matters!

Sit down with yourself
and ferret out what matters to you.
Then stand up,
step back into your life,
and live there as though
what matters to you matters!!!

Put passion into your life!
Care!!! about what you are doing!
Do the things your care about!
Do the things that matter to you!
Take your time with the things
that are important to you.
Do them right, properly, correctly
every time you do them!

Cherish them!
Honor them!
Revere them!
Worship them!
Do them as though 
they are important to you!
Every time you do them!

Put yourself into what you are doing!
Why hold anything back?
What are you saving up for?
Care about what you care about--
every day for the rest of your life!

–0–

02

What is the difference between
being centered/grounded/rooted/
focused
and being stuck?

We are held in place
where we are
by our idea of how things are
and how they ought to be.

How accurate is our idea
is the question.
What difference does it make
is the other question.

By what standard
do we gauge the accuracy
of our idea 
and measure the difference
it makes
is another question.

How do we know 
how well we are evaluating
our situation?
How do we know 
that what we are doing
in response to it
is the right thing to do?

Who says so?

How do we know 
they know
what they are talking about?

We are stuck with our ideas
about all of these things.

We are stuck in how we view
what we look at,
no matter how we view it.

And no matter how we change
our mind,
we are only exchanging being stuck
in one place
for being stuck in another.

Being grounded/centered/rooted
focused
must include compassion 
for all ways of seeing/evaluating/
thinking about what we call reality,
and the ability to do what matters
without taking any of it seriously.

Being stuck in this way
is being like the spirit
that blows where it will--
tail dancing with the dolphins,
laughing all the way.

–0–

01

The point,
the whole point,
and nothing but the point,
is to do what needs to be done
right here, right now
because it needs to be done
and because you need to do it
and because if you don't do it,
it won't be done,
and for yet again,
what needed to happen
did not happen.

The only thing that makes sense
is assisting what needs help
coming into existence,
coming into being.

With me, here and now,
this means typing words
maybe no one ever reads.
That doesn't matter.
My place is to type the words.
Right here. 
Right now.

Gerard Manley Hopkins said,
as those who do read what I write
have heard two hundred times,
"What I do is me--
for that I came."
Doing what we came to do
is the only thing that matters.
Why would we not do it?

Finding what we came to do,
and doing it,
moment after moment,
all our life long
is the most beautiful thing 
in the world.

Speaking of the world,
look it over
and tell me how many people
you see doing what they came to do--
doing what is theirs to do--
doing what the moment needs to have done,
right here, right now.

That is how many people who are not missing
the point of their life.
Why would anyone want to do that?
Why would anyone put all the effort
that is required into living their life
and not do what they came to do with it?

What needs doing?
What needs you to do it?
What do you need to do?
Right here, right now?
Why not do it?

02

I've been wondering lately
about what's working.
Government is not working anywhere.
Democracy is not working in the US
or the UK.
The GOP is the most dysfunctional political party
I have ever lived with.
I could go on.
And on.
About what is not working.

Gravity is working.
Music is working.
Poetry is working.
AUMMMMmmmmmm... is working.
Ice cream is working.
COVID vaccines are working.
...

A lot of things are working just fine.

How about you?
Are you working?
I'm working above 85% most days.
I'd like to do it all over,
with me as my father.
That would have been exactly
what I needed at the start.
It took me way too long
to begin fathering myself.

We all would have been better off
with better parents.
And our parents would have been better off
with better parents.
And so on,
all the way back to Lucy,
and whomever played the role of Dezzy.

But, here we are.
Now what?

This is our boat
and it is up to us to paddle it.
Just as it is.
There is no taking it back
to the Boat dealer for a refund,
or a trade.

So, what's working about your life?
What is not working?
What can you do to work around 
what is not working?
To work with what is not working?

If you separate what is not working
from what is working,
what do you have to work with?
What is the part that is working
asking of you?
What does it need to work better?
What is it calling for?

How about focusing more of you time
and attention on what is working,
and less on what is not working?

Just paying attention to what is working,
and to what is not working,
would be a good place to start. 
Just observe what is working
and what is not working.
Just be aware of what is working,
and what is not working.

See where awareness alone takes you.

And add awareness to your list 
of things that are working.

I just added it to mine!

–0–

01

There is what we do to pay the bills,
and there is what we pay the bills to do.

These two things are primary,
essential--
the fundamental,
base requirements for being alive.

We have to be clear about those two things,
what we are doing and why we are doing it.

And, we have to bear the pain
of the compromises required to do
those two things.
And all the other things we do
in conjunction with those two things.

Most of the other things we do
have no bearing on the two primary things.
And they take all our energy and attention
away from the two primary things.

Our focus and attention has very little to do
with the two primary things,
and everything to do with
escape, distraction, diversion and denial
regarding our life,
and what we are doing,
and why we are doing it,
and what we are to be about,
and how differently we should be living
in order to be about it.

Our life is where we hide from life.

List the things you hate about your life
and the things you love about your life.
And tell me where you spend your time,
doing things on each list.

You spend your time doing the things
you hate about your life.

You talk about what you love,
you do what you hate.
And you wonder why you aren't happy.

You aren't happy because you aren't alive.
You are mostly dead.
Because of the way you spend your time.

Being alive requires you to transform
your relationship with yourself
and with your life.
And bear the pain of the contradictions
involved with what you do to pay the bills
and what you pay the bills to do.

Being alive requires us to bear the pain
of being alive.

Jesus said, "Pick up your cross every day
and come with me."

Our cross is the pain of being alive--
the pain of the contradictions involved
with being alive.

We live to incarnate the contradictions,
to integrate the contradictions,
to be the contradictions,
between what we do to pay the bills
and what we pay the bills to do.

We bring Yang and Yin to life in our life.
We are Yang and Yin.

The Tao gives rise to the Source.
The Source gives rise to Yin and Yang.
Yin and Yang give rise to
heaven and earth and human beings.
And from those three
everything else flows.

Our work is to live in such a way
as to smooth the flow
by consciously bearing the pain
of the contradictions at work
in our life.

Where is your pain?
Your agony?
Your anguish?
Your contradictions?
Walk into it.
Embrace it.
Dance with it.
Work with it.
Laugh with it.
Love it.

Reconcile what can be reconciled.
Maintain the tension between
irreconcilable polarities.
Do what needs to be done
in light of all opposites,
conflicts,
dichotomies,
divisions
and differences.

Integrity is holding all of it together
in the light of awareness
and doing what is called for
in each situation as it arises
upon the heaving waves
of the wine-dark sea.

03

Anything properly considered
becomes a portkey to realization
and transformation.

A horoscope, a fortune cookie
(The fortune or the cookie), 
a horseshoe nail...

The key is a meditative perspective
and a problem or a pressing question,
and the probing inquiry:
"How does this connect with that?"

Sit with the question
as a novice might wrestle
with a koan.

"What does that have to do with this?"

Carry it with you through the day,
perhaps for several days,
looking for the connection,
the contact point, 
the "Aha!" of recognition.

The magic is there
waiting for you to do the work
of preparing the way
for the magic to happen.

How significant is the problem?
How pressing is the question?
The motivation for seeking the magic
has to carry you past 
boredom and frustration
into the work of seeking 
the philosopher's stone.

–0–

02

Between being unbalanced
and out of harmony,
and being centered and focused,
in the flow
and at one with ourselves
and our circumstances,
are we conscious
of the transition point
where one goes over into the other?

Do we know when we are moving from one
to the other?

Are we mindful enough of our state of being
to know when we are facing a choice
that has the potential
of destabilizing us
or re-stabilizing us?

If we are destabilized,
do we know what it will take
to re-stabilize us?

Everything depends upon,
flows out of,
revolves around
our balance and harmony--
our connection with our center,
core, foundation, source,
original nature.

To be in accord with this
is to be in accord with the Tao
and at one with the flow of life
through time and place.

Knowing and avoiding 
what disrupts that flow,
and finding our way back to it
when it is disturbed,
are the guiding principles
of the species,
and we would do well
to nurture and maintain
our connection with them
throughout our days.

–0–

01

Growing up is waking up.
Waking up is growing up.
Both involve
transforming our relationship
with ourselves and our life.

"Nothing changes until we do"
could be a bit of Mary Poppins wisdom
on the order of,
"Anything can happen if you let it."

Even Chinese fortune cookies
can wake us up "if we let it."

We stand between ourselves
and what might yet be.

Whose side are we on?

What is not working in our life?

What do we need that we don't have?

Waking up is growing up,
is seeing what needs to be done
and doing it.

What is keeping that from happening?
What has to change for everything to change?

Think of the Tao as
"The way things need to be."

Living in accord with the Tao
is living to assist things
in being what they need to be
in each situation as it arises--
no matter what it might mean 
for us personally.

This is the fundamental message
of Jesus of Nazareth.
"Do not think about yourselves
and what is in it for you!
Pick up your cross daily,
and come along with me!"

Jesus was one with the Tao.
He was what the situation 
needed him to be
in every situation that came along.
The answer to the question,
"What would Jesus do?"
is "What needs to be done
in every situation that arises
all your life long."

What is keeping that from happening? 

03

We are looking for what?
What would it take to be 
satisfied and content?

What person, living or dead,
actual or fictional,
is your ideal of having lived
the way you would like to live?
So that, at the end,
you could be proud
of the life you lived?

Keep that person before you
as you step into your day,
and into each situation as it arises
in each day.
How would that person do it?
Do your life?
In this set of circumstances?
Here and now?
Do it like that!

Become the actress/actor
playing the role of that person
in the life you are living.
Do your best imitation
of the person throughout your day.

See what shifts for you,
what changes,
what transformations come about--
either in your life
or in your demeanor.
How are things different
in your life as the other person?

Changing our relationship with our life
can be life changing.
Because nothing changes
until we do.

–0–

02

Being in the moment 
is the hardest thing to do,
the hardest thing to be.

We are just passing through
here and now
on our way to somewhere else.
And, when we get there,
it will then be here, now,
and we will be on our way
to somewhere else.

Always going.
Never being where we are,
when we are.

Always impatient.
Always bored.
Always pining for better.
Anywhere but here.
Anything but this.

What can I say to change things?
I can only hope to say
what I see,
and to see what is there,
which is here, now.
Beyond that, the forces
of fate and destiny
are at play in the world.
"And the beat goes on"
(Sonny Bono).

In the meantime,
there is this moment,
and we can sit with it,
dance with it,
rush through it,
ignore it,
watch it
closely
to see 
exactly
when
now
becomes 
then,
and 
discover
for ourselves
that now
never ends.

It is always now.

It is here that is always changing.

And both are always calling for something.

Asking something of us.

What is it, here and now?

How can we help?

What does here and now need
from us?

What will we do about that?

Every moment comes down to this.

What will we do?

Here, now?

–0–

01

Things are the way they are
because it is easier that way.

Nature's course tends to be 
the course of least resistance.

Why waste energy?

Inertia is the tendency
of a body in motion
to remain in motion,
and of a body at rest 
to remain at rest.

Momentum is a function
of mass and velocity,
friction and slope.

Change happens over time
in response to its environment,
and in relation to its 
immediate surroundings.

How different we can be depends
on factors approaching infinity--
but, our tendency is 
to not be different at all.
And, our preferences strongly
impact our performance.

Put all of this together
and that is why
things are as they are.

It is easier that way.

The energy required to change
has to come from somewhere.
What is our motivation?
Alcoholics generally require
a near-death experience
to pop out of alcoholism
into "I'm Jim and I'm an alcoholic."

We are all alcoholics
on some level,
to some degree,
in some sense.
It takes a lot of effort
to exchange our way for The Way.
Why bother?
What's in it for us?
Who cares?
What do we care?
Things are fine just as they are.

And that is why things are as they are.

It is going to take a lot
for them to be different.

The Tao can only wait.
And let the dead bury the dead.
As nearly dying does what it can
to wake up those who can be waked up
while there is still time left for living.

03

If you don't know what I mean,
you can't expect to understand
what I'm saying.

We get to meanings
through the process
of living our lives.
By the track our thoughts take,
the questions we ask,
the books we read,
the conversations we engage in,
and those we overhear...

The experience of life leads us
to the meanings we share,
and if that doesn't do it,
nothing will.

The experience of life 
brings us together,
or forces separation--
accidents of time and place.

We speak to each other
out of our experience of life.
If our experience isn't close--
or if it is close,
but impacted us in vastly different ways--
we will live in worlds apart,
nodding, perhaps,
and smiling in passing.

–0–

02

If we are looking at things the wrong way,
nothing is going to change for the better
about our life
for as long as our way of seeing
remains unchanged.

The Natural Law flowing from this is:
If we want things to change,
we have to change the way
we are looking at things.

Its corollary states:
Nothing can change until we do.

If our life isn't working,
we have to realize it is our life
that isn't working,
and not the way the world is
that isn't working.

It is the way we are in the world
that isn't working.

We have to realize that
and get to work revising
the way we look at the world.

That means reexamining everything.
Our expectations.
Our inferences.
Our assumptions.
Our preferences.
Our opinions.
Our positions.
Our conclusions.
Our certainties.
Our convictions...

We have to see the way 
we are seeing things
and ask the questions
that beg to be asked
about how we see 
what we look at.

What makes us think
the way we see things
is the way things are?

Where does that line lie?
The one between the way we see
and the way things are?

Become proficient in finding it,
and knowing the difference
between how we think things are
and how things are.

Or, in just remembering 
there is a difference!

–0–

01

We have become so automatic with our living
that we have no idea
when our heart gave up on us
and left the game.

We have been dead for so long
that all we know is the funeral march
and the dirges that never end.

Occasionally, we wake up in the night,
gripped by the realization 
that this isn't it,
but we think that more of what isn't working
is the cure,
and redouble our efforts
to have a good time
when what we call "a good time"
hasn't been good for anything
from the start.

Who are we kidding?
Why are we kidding anyone?
Would somebody please tell us
what the hell is going on here?
And why aren't we happy about it?

Oh, this is where I come in!

We are wasting our life
is what is going on here.
And have been for time past remembering.
We are wandering around
in the Waste Land,
trolling for some reason 
to go on with it.

We are suffering from the
complete loss of authenticity.
The utter dissociation from integrity.
The total takeover of artificiality. 

We quit living the day we started
thinking our way through our life.

When was the last time we felt
our way from one thing to the next?
Our To Do List informs us
of what needs to be done!
Without that kind of direction,
we have no clue about what to do
with ourselves.
And we are terrified
of being left alone
to figure it out on our own.

What if we are wrong?

We have been wrong for so long,
right left when our heart did.

It's time to get those babies back!

Sit down and wait for something
to stir within.
Something authentic, genuine, real, true.
With the force 
of needing to go to the toilet
directing us to act.

Wait for your heart to wake up
and take over the driver's seat.
And don't move until it does.
Even to go to the toilet.