"Once I, Chuang Tzu, dreamed I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself, but I did not know that I was Tzu. Suddenly I awoke, and there was I, visibly Tzu. I do not know whether it was Tzu dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he was Tzu. Between Tzu and the butterfly there must be some distinction. [But one may be the other.] This is called the transformation of things."

~Chuang Tzu

I was walking to pay the rent and mail a sympathy card when a swallowtail butterfly floated to me and past. Large, yellow and black. In a parking lot on December 30.

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world,
the master calls a butterfly. “

~Richard Bach

[I came upon these butterfly quotes yesterday on a website called “allspirit”.]

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;
The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.


~Ryokan

There are people who put a quarter into you—no more than that—and expect you to put out. Magic, food, sex, jokes, diagnosis, opinions that put into words their thoughts, validation that they are wonderful, ill, intriguing, underappreciated, special. When the first quarter doesn’t work, they irritably try another quarter. You can see the look on their faces. Frustration. Disdain.

You give it a go but when you’re still not producing what they would have of you, they give you a shake, or a kick or a lecture, as though to say what is wrong with this vending machine—not what its built up to be.

To them I say: Save your quarters. Look into yourselves for what it is you’re hoping to find.

To the machine I say: Don’t feel guilty for not putting out for every quarter you’re offered.

Sometimes I’m the machine. Sometimes, I’m sorry to say, it’s me inserting the quarters.

I scrubbed tubs and toilets today. An accomplishment few notice until the toilet smells or the tub grows black. We only notice if it is not done.

I know there is more that I can do--but I don’t know how to find the work that puts me to good use. (And pays me and provides health insurance.)

I am good at offering specific compliments. I am good at caring for babies and small children. I am good at calming adults in distress. I am good at prioritizing. I am good at walking, exploring. I am good at basic descriptive astronomy. I have basic birding skills. I can edit. I’m a good driver. Talented at Freecell, Backgammon, word games. Good and creative Googler. I can cook a healthy meal--a delicious meal, fresh, and nourishing to the eye as well as the body and palate. I can stand on my head. I can hold my breath. I swim a strong breast stroke. I can run. Shoot hoops. Take a nicely composed photo. Recognize a good photo, piece of art or writing. Read aloud with clear diction. Act a variety of roles as long as I have the script in hand. Work with dreams and sand tray creations. Write an effective letter. String a guitar. Set up a tent.

Anyone got a job for me?

The grass is bleached of life. The shoulders of the oaks are hunched, minimizing exposure to sun and wind, minimizing loss of moisture. The creek that two years ago received ice melting off branches, drops ringing like chimes and bells in a natural symphony, is today stone and dust. Not even a puddle behind the dam.

The green fern at the cleft of the limestone leafless. All that remains are pale brittle stems.

It has not rained here for a long long time.

Life fumbles along, a beetle here, squirrels, deer, jackrabbits. Red-tailed hawk and American kestrel. Still here. Less exuberant. More contained and focused inward for survival. Still here.

Drought a part of the cycle. To be lived if not with joy, with grace.

Yesterday, I took a walk after the Christmas feasting and entertaining were over. The little goblins were biting. I hadn’t given the right gifts to this person. I hadn’t paid close enough attention to the broccoli cooking. I wasn’t appreciative enough of the dessert someone brought. I hadn’t gone to be with my parents for Christmas. I had emailed a friend something that sounded like a put down of something she had sent me. I was at the root cause of everyone’s discomfort. Guilty guilty guilty of so many sins in one day--not to mention my mortal sins and inadequacies of this past year.

It was hard to pick up my feet I was so weighted with petty and not so petty crime.

But then almost home the light turned soft, the western sky glowed, ribboned with orange. The air cooled. The houses on the hill had their little holiday lights glowing most softly in the sunset. The goblins lifted and I felt joy.

Just past midnight--Christmas Day.

The radio announcer said NOA has been tracking Santa by radar all evening--he’s been spotted in Labrador, New Foundland, and, most recently, St. Louis. They’ll keep us informed.

I’ve been told of a little girl in Baton Rouge who called her mom tonight on her cell--and told her to not forget Santa. No cookies and milk--he gets that from everyone. She wanted Mom to buy some tuna so they could make a sandwich for Santa.

Thanks to this girl in Louisiana, Santa will have his protein.

But does anyone have alfalfa for the reindeer?

It’s a beautiful morning this morning. My apartment is filled with light, the shadows of tree branches dancing on the walls. Small things I like to look at: Christmas photos from friends and my guitar, and a sunlit star atop the little Norfolk pine. A Christmas card with the Mother and Child and a cheerful message from a friend whose family survived Katrina--but whose home did not.

This morning I awakened lonely and afraid--my teachers of the past year have been unavailable this week--ill or needed by others. I saw the Narnia movie yesterday and could only think--was the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe such a promotion for war? I saw traffic before me, isolation, nightmares and deterioration.

But the reality is this room with light and I don’t have any wisdom, just the putting one foot ahead of the other and looking outward today instead of in. I have people who need me, and I will do my best to be there for them. Sometimes you just have to get over yourself.

The light in the room has shifted onto my face--I can hardly see the computer screen. That is the point of the day, isn’t it. Not the meal preparation and the shopping and the cleaning--but the awakening to the light.

Grocery store. Sports store. Mall. Movie theater. You name it-the clerks are tight-lipped this year. Intimidated. No Merry Christmas! No Happy Holidays! Have a nice day, if you’re lucky.

It’s December. It’s ‘that’ time of year. Just hand over the credit card.

President sends his season’s greetings, and the card is taken apart by the recipients and by pundits who are sour graped about not getting any cards at all. Ho!

Hey! You got a card! Just put it on the mantel with the others. Put religous cards on the right side, and secular cards on the left (or right in the flames of the fireplace where those pagans are gonna end up any way).

Or hide the religous cards behind the jolly cards (have you noticed religous cards are never jolly?) so your secular friends won’t know you have religous family and friends or even the occasional religous leaning yourself.

Well. 2005 is almost over. I’m tired of being right or left. I’m tired of being red or blue.

Just call me purple.

Peace and Love, Dahlings.

where the impossible is possible
is where i met you
a new question more than an answer
a clean breeze
that swept the dust
from my cracked feet
a bright moon rising as the sun set
the possibility
blinders might fall
that i might still see in new ways

Not like with Gods
who want blindered belief,
worship and humility
you, a brother scarred by sorrow,
spar
shoulder pressed to shoulder
an exquisite exchange
you accept my honest answer
i accept your human breath
your spiritual question

I looped tiny lights of many colors around the railing of my balcony--for me, the deer, the birds and the squirrels. Happy Solstice!

The winter solstice happens tomorrow.

I celebrate the solstice. Older than Christmas. More fundamental. Something purely mechanical. A small tick of the celestial clock. (The equinox perhaps the tock.)

A mechanical event that affects the biological. (Long nights, jet lag—we know how changes in light affect the Biological clock.)

Celebrated, or at least noted, by humans all over the northern hemisphere--whatever the calendar—whatever the century--whether it was called December or had a name or not--the longest night was recognized millennia earlier than the birth of Christ.

As one of the humans here on the planet, I think about what the Christmas season is about. Not the politically astute selection of December to celebrate the birth of a holy man who was more likely born in spring. But why do I go out in the cold to plug in little twinkly lights every night. Why the gifts and the cards and the preparation of special foods. Why the reaching out to family and friends no longer near. The gathering at churches on Christmas Eve to light candles. The gathering for parties.

What is this really about?

As sunlight retracts, we get--on a most animal level—sad and afraid. In the dark, we feel like giving up. We’re dying! We’re dying! Until we go—oh, right. Winter. Just like last year and the year before and before. We look around. It IS dark. What can we do?

It’s in the dark we acknowledge that it is good to be human among other humans, to share light and warmth and food, to become generous. We celebrate the birth of a baby. A lamp that burned a week on a day’s worth of oil. A day a minute shorter than the last. We give gifts, help the needy, light candles and strings of light. Raise our cups to say, Fuck the dark! Light our tiny lights against the big fear.

Until, again with the very regular mechanics of the planet within the solar system, the sun returns with spring.

Christmas is on a most basic level about the solstice. The celebration of a human manifestation of light against the mechanical manifestation of the Dark.

It’s about absence of light. It’s about Light.

dark light dark light
day night day night
stars ignite. stars expire.
nebula expand. nebula contract.
winter dark summer light
a pulse in time
The earth has revolved around the sun again.
Another beat
in the composition
a chorus of voices
each their own music,
each their own time,
each a part of
the universal symphony

how many breaths do you take
in and out and in and out
dawn to dawn?

in one spin of your planet?

how many heart beats
in one breath?

The sycamore on the street has lost its leaves.
Not yet winter, tight-furled new buds
expose an intention for growth...

Yesterday I had lunch with Sam, Jimmy and Matt at Jorge’s. My heart was full the whole time. How I have loved those boys. Matt I’ve neighbor-mommed since he was in first grade. Jimmy connected with us soon after his family moved to Texas when he was in middle school. And Sam--who as a teen was always careful to keep his friend circle separate from the parental circle--arranged this lunch. It made my day.

They drove to meet me in the very white Mitsubishi 1992 van that I drove them in for over 10 years. How strange is this life?

I have known people who let go
and trusted another trapeze bar would show up
as they are in midair.

I have known people to take one small step in a new direction--and one more after that.

I have known people to plant seeds. Some grow, some don’t, some are a surprise years later.

I have known people out of fear to dig in deeper, to hide from change only to have change fall in on them like a meteorite through the roof.

I have known people to slowly smother in a closed house. An open window all that was needed.

I have known people to die happy. I have known people to die afraid.

You might do something different today.
Look at your spouse, your teacher, your child, your friend with open eyes instead of grunting, obeying, ordering.
Call someone you’ve never called.
Listen to a radio station that speaks in a language foreign to you.
If you like to talk--be quiet today. If you don’t talk much--say something.
Park in a new spot.
Wear a color you never wear.
Practice your waving hand.
Walk around your house/apartment and see what grows and lives outdoors around you.
Sing the very first song you remember.

I don’t know the answer to your question, but maybe you do.

i am all wound up
i’m an arrow on a cocked string
waiting for release
i’m a fledgling falcon
with her eye on the world

I went out to toss the carrot peelings on the compost pile, and stopped, thinking I’d heard a kestrel. I heard the call again, more distant, and could not spot it. But standing still there for so long, a golden-fronted woodpecker resumed his research up and down the trunks of the live oaks. The pale breast, the bright red beanie, the black and white ladder back. But I heard him first:

Tap-taptaptap-tap-tap-taptap. Like popcorn popping or a jazz percussionist with a random beat.

And the familiar sound on a December day--the beak against wood was a tenderness--like a hand on one’s shoulder--calming and bringing thoughts of spring.

Kate Breakey is an artist who lived in Austin for a while. I woke up today thinking about her.

She made dead things soar.

She took photos of dead animals and flowers--sometimes roadkill. Mostly, it was birds. From those photos, she made large black and white prints over which she layered transparent oils.

You might think, what a macabre process. The intimate examination of death. But then you look at her paintings, the colors like fires, lit-up blues, rose-golds, umbers. You might believe there is more life in the dead, in the grieving, than there is in the living. You look at her paintings--a beautiful fist to the gut.

I heard her speak at the Texas Book Festival in 2001. She attracted a crowd.

She showed slides. Some from her childhood--was it in Australia? Some poverty or darkness in her childhood I no longer remember.

I do remember her as a beautiful woman in disarray. Blonde hair rather matted. Her humor fragile. Her eyes darting. Her voice trembled, but her passion was formidable.

As she spoke, we looked at her tremendous paintings, her dead things with their vibrant auras. I had a sharp insight about what drove her work. Others were asking about technique, or where she had lived. I had an observation that seemed to me would get to the heart of everything.

You paint over and over again, as though if you paint enough of these, you will finally...

I didn’t say whatever it was I was going to say. I saw her, repeating again and again this process--the lighting, the photos, the prints, the painting and painting and painting, not covering over the dead, but illuminating them. Who was I to try to reduce her process to clumsy words?

We can’t do the work of others, no matter how much grief we would like to save them. No one can do our work for us. Part of what illuminates our living is the grief. We too make dead birds soar.

I was up, reading the funny papers in the kitchen around 6:15 this morning, still dark out. The doorbell rang. I flipped on the front light, and saw a sheriff’s deputy in full gear, standing where he could see both the door and the kitchen window.

I opened the door a crack. He looked on edge, the muscles of his face strained, his voice tense and serious, but not harsh. He told me they had received a 911 call from our house, and got only a busy signal when they tried to return the call. I knew the phone was on the blink, so I told him that, and let him in to confirm it himself.

I left the door wide open in case something weird was going on and we’d want to escape. My son wandered out of his room in his shorts, yawned, walked past the deputy as though we have the law drop in the front door every day, got a box of oatmeal squares out of the pantry, the milk from the fridge.

The deputy took a good look around as he approached the phone. I tried to see what he was seeing: the huge black cases near the front door that might have looked threatening except for the sheet music giving it away that they contained the two halves of a tuba. The stacks of mail on the counter, the Christmas tree, the red plastic pieces on a board game on the coffee table, the open bottle of syrah near the sink with an inch of wine still in it from last night. Would he think I was drinking at 6 AM? The button with son’s band photo on it. The sheet of paper on the wall by the phone with emergency numbers, 911, friends’ numbers on display.

The deputy picked up the phone with his back to the wall. I could hear the crackle of the static from where I stood. His shoulders visibly lost some of their tautness, and he said that happens sometimes. Have a cold spell or something, wires get crossed.

His neck was twisted toward his right shoulder, his face perhaps a hopeful one by nature, disappointed by experience. His chest was big, out of proportion to his limbs, and I guess he had a kevlar vest on under there. Trying to keep safe against the worst.

He didn’t have much to say then, and returned toward the door, again his back always to the wall. I extended my hand and he shook it.

I felt a little stunned after he left. Wished irrelevantly the house had been less disorderly. I looked down at my mismatched pajamas. I imagined if I’d offered him some coffee, or how one might get him to the masseuse in Dripping to help relieve some of the serious tension in that right shoulder. I imagined what it would be like to hold a job where you open a door, and perhaps find blood and mayhem or perhaps find a Christmas tree and spread out funny papers. A raging 6 ft drunk or a 5 ft 3 mom with a 6 ft son rubbing sleep from his eyes. I could feel my right shoulder tense, too.

I try to remember if it was a flashlight or a gun he held in his hand at first. I really don’t know.

We are either robots or rebels to the ‘I shoulds’ in our lives.

What is most difficult is acknowledging the ‘I wants.’

I remember standing in biology class in 10th grade, still dazed, trying to assimilate a Johnny Carson show I’d watched the night before. He had interviewed Ayn Rand, author of Anthem and The Fountainhead.

She argued that selfishness was better than altruism for the survival of both the individual and mankind. Supported her argument with a compelling logic and with examples I no longer recall.

This shook my foundation. A Catholic girl reared in Catholic schools, I was taught over and over the beauty of sacrifice of self for others. 1001 ways to do it. I was the poster child for suppression of self. I believed in the Christ-like giving of one’s self like I believed the earth rotates on its axis. Sacrifice good, selfishness bad. So obvious, was it even worthy of argument?

Ayn Rand thought so.

I did not change over night, did not become a convert. But I never forgot either.

Then, in recent years I have come to recognize how warped some of my generosity has become, how giving in is not always in the best interest of either me or the recipient. Denial of self in favor of kindness can require disconscious routine dishonesties that erode awareness.

“It’s no trouble at all.” “I want you to have the seat in front.” “I’d like to go to the movie you guys want to see.” How often are statements like those honest? Soon you no longer know your own preferences. You note with puzzlement how you emit little snide remarks, little sarcasms. Where did those come from? What disconnected blindered invalids we become. Our starved selves cry out for attention in convoluted ways that pretend to generosity.

I think again of Ayn Rand’s theory, yet even so cannot envision kindness left out off the equation of life.

Like Rumi’s quote I posted a few days ago: ‘you have two wings to fly, not just one.’ Christ and Rand wings on the same bird.

I took tai chi for the first time tonight. Drove down icy streets in the dark. Landed in a room with blue carpet, looked like a church foyer. A class with two other students. I couldn’t hide.

Tai chi is harder than I imagined. Yoga can be physically challenging, but the brain gets it pretty quickly, even if the body doesn’t right away. Tai chi involves the coordination of so many forces, each with their own script. Right hand moving differently than left at the same time the feet are each doing their thing. Breathe in here, breathe out there. Flow and precision. Movement and balance. We learned 2 postures of a 46-posture form. It took concentration.

I watched the teacher, how his face changed from genial disorder to inscrutable composure as he moved through a set.

Perhaps this is what I need, the integration of my scattered forces into one. Coalescence.

poem from 1984--

Plain of Six Glaciers

Standing near great shelves of ice
Eternity whispers white
cupped in brown, the peaks
at God's feet.

Sun warms the plain on which we sink
with white-warm light. We drink
the melting waters clear and deep
at God's feet.

When it's on target, a simile delights us in much the same way meeting an old friend in a crowd of strangers does. By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects, a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage--we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way. Even if the result is mere clarity instead of beauty, I think writer and reader are participating together in a kind of miracle. Maybe that's drawing it a little strong, but yeah--it's what I believe.

Stephen King

The truth is
there is a howling wilderness in your chest

you get by on lies
(people don’t want to know truth
unless you are on stage
or producing paintings
that will never go on a living room wall--
who could live with them?)

people say
smile
people say
pretend you are happy
soon it will be so

(yep. soon it will be so--automatic pilot through your days until one day the days stop--you’re out of time and there’s a look of surprise on your face as you go down.)

you don’t know the answer
perhaps there is none
you either smile
or you don’t.

Bruised and hungry
you don’t want to do the happy dance no more
you want the blade in hand
knees bent
arms wide
to take it on
to fight
because you have never fought before.