heart-to-heart conversations

..turn wheels

vulnerability

Sometimes I worry that my neighbor is having open heart surgery on my behalf. With every inhalation, another chance to open. With every exhalation, another chance to relax.

By the Battery Tunnel

late snow

fast clocks

Some truck-mounted scenery on Kent Avenue this morning was too eloquent in light of the tragedy that took place in the vicinity early this month when a young couple and their gestating child died needlessly. All kinds of people drive a lot like Mr. Acevedo. My daughter and I have almost been hit twice now on 11th Avenue in Windsor Terrace. What sort of trance comes over a person when they get behind the wheel? What sort of disgusting power-lust gratification plays out?

central park, facing west

  

Schist strata exposed by the blasting that made way for Central Park West. The gleam of mica amid time's blackening here reminds me of William Bryan Logan's statement that "Beauty is the vocation of the world." The poetics of stratigraphy confound the mind.

What do you call....it?

Being in The Hall of Dead Names and Dry Skins did its part in steering me towards revisiting the geo and biopoetics recorded by Martin Prechtel in his account of life in a pre-westernized Mayan village. What if the only way to heal ourselves is by finding devotion-names for all the things scientific materialism has reduced to museum exhibits, classification reference books, raw materials for opulence. Language can begin to wake us up to the magnificent family we are part of in this web of all masterful articulations of matter.

creeepy beautiful

spring preview

Smith Street Ramble

Wonderlanders

Park Slope, saved, once again, by buried power lines and the subway system and those long, heavy things that run on those underground rails. Droves of people of all ages tore around the park in snow raptures as another one of water's super powers flaired out in full display.

and the dead lived and the living slept

I made an offering of lovely things to the spirit of MLK yesterday, and also to the spirits of my ancestors. There must be as many of them as there are stars in the sky, all going back to a shared seed of humanity. If the tree of humanity can bear such fruit as our passionate tremulous song-voiced dreamer, then I dearly bless its germination.

Since January 1 I've found myself making altars in honor of the family dead, the ancestors I knew and the ones I didn't. This was an unplanned resolution. The altar-mandala-beauty offering, whatever you call it, does help me feel a connection. It seems to be a portal that breathes hidden life and warmth. I find myself in tears with a sense of the courageous and troubling and beautiful moments that shaped the lives of my forbears, all the jewels of their beings hidden from me but within my sense somehow. It is a place for weeping. I understand the Romans and their Lares a bit now, through a Talmudic story. As if to say, if as fetuses we were willed to forget the truth, then as the dead, we remember it again. So I pray for guidance for us living-sleeping from the endless dendrites of veiled but still warm beauty.

sometimes help looks nothing like you expected

Wheel Turners

My new favorite word for problem is hucha, thank you to the Mayans. It's the sense of heaviness and dread that surrounds the things that terrify us. It rigidifies patterns that undermine the best in us and it entrenches people's creativity. In this sense, anytime a problem is identified and addressed, anytime a long festering contortion of truth comes to a head, a small-or large- miracle happens. It's amazing how long it can take to identify a problem, how we are masters at keeping them immaculately obfuscated. It's astonishing how may ways there are to avoid them and how many different kinds there are,  although it may be that they are all the same substance at the root.

It's also steep to reckon how much damage denying a problem day after day can do. I guess we get our mythic dragons and demons from these things, these gorgons can be so hard to face. What's down in the ditches with burs in the britches? Where in us is the knight, or the Mastermaid, with the charm to break the enchantment?  Still, sometimes it seems like all the angels just get together and sing "ENOUGH!"

ice on the hill

cloud cover

The sky a week ago..today the petticoats hang even lower. We walk around among a very slow and vast cotillion here in Brooklyn. A white haired woman on 9th Street who walked with the help of her shopping cart said she will do it while she still can. She'll do what she can, until he rings the bell. But he hasn't rung it yet. Instead, he gave her some free cutlets.

unearthed

brooklyn grub

Something else I found, discovered while on my compost shift at the St. Mark's Community Garden, luckily it escaped the spade. Held in the gloved hand, as light as a moonbeam, then tucked back under the sweet black earth.

Sun Drop

The lines below appear in a sacred Hawaiian text I came across oon Seeley St recently, a product of the weeding the shelves and thousands of years of indigenous Hawaiian mythopoetics. Of the books I pick up from the library of the streets I read few and keep less. This one,  Lelaini Melville's Children of the Rainbow, contains the Tumuripo, sacred verse that was until recently forbidden to Westerners. Everytime I read it, I feel so much better. Here's a selection of lines from the Tumuripo, the Hawaiian creation story. I find it in the same spirit as Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, and dedicate the poetry of these tropes to all of Brooklyn's leaves of grass and winged Nikes.

A Goddess ascended to Heaven, soared right up to Heaven
And mounted the luxuriant woodlands of the Celestial World
From where this trembling earth fled rumbling into the wind
She sprouted from, flew forth from, the King of Heaven
The "Cause" of Life that radiated yellowish-white light.
A chosen, esteemed spirit clothed in a raiment of flame.
The strange body of the Goddess was veiled in unfathomable mystery.
Calm and Peaceful it was when the soul of Man was developed in multitudes.
When the first 40,000 were breathed into being with a shout of joy.
Who caused this earth to roar through space.
Born in the breath of the Protector of Po was woman,
born with her eyes closed, from Infinite Ra, Infinite Ra.
With the rising of the sun came Ra'i Ra'i who alighted at dawn and produced her children who were born bisexual and dualistic in nature.

Po: the unknowable realm of spirit
Ra: Sun God
Ra'i  Ra'i: The Sun God's daughter

hearts of brooklyn

We found common ground. I can get to one of the organizations providing relief services for victims of the hurricane, Congregation Beth Elohim, by walking through Prospect Park. Last Sunday I signed up for the early meal preparation shift, so I passed through the Park before 8 while the low sun projected the silhouettes of trees into the mist. When I got to the temple it was nearly empty, and the doorman helped me rummage around for the Costco delivery we'd need to make the 600 or so sandwiches that would be taken to Rockaway. I spent the morning folding slices of turkey and shelling eggs, listening to people's stories and engaging in that state of group awareness that one might describe as hive mind. We worked, listening as we told each other stories that were occasionally punctuated by the doorman's singing.

We found common ground. It was and is such an honor to be in the presence of Brooklyn's willing and eager volunteers. It is amazing to know that in many cases there is no where else these individuals would choose to be. It is such an beautiful thing to watch the kitchen and chapel fill with supplies and empty and refill, like a heart. It is sublime to know that this is happening in countless places throughout the city.

The King of the Waves

The sight of the rainbow sash across the chest of this aquatic deity I'd come across launched me into a Buddhist diatribe about the nature of mind based on the message of the Heart Sutra, reportedly a gift of the Naga King. Does that make sense to anyone? My apologies to the photographer who had to listen to this that day in early October, who would rather have been left alone with his camera and shutter speed and attempts at making the fountain's braiding arches of water stand still. I don't think he really bought my argument that we ourselves, and not the world, are responsible for our experience. No doubt, it's absolutely true and not true, flatly wrong and squarely on the money. What a boring world this would be if we had easy answers.

My shot was a blur, as you can see, as is my understanding of the ideas behind this fountain at Grand Army Plaza. What was there to influence the creation of the Greek Poseidon, surely thousands of years of folklore and ritual completely lost to us. But we are mostly content to think it stops there, because that's what we learned in school. How far back do to these water kings go? I came across one recently in a Chinese folktale, Wild Goose Lake, which also bore the trope of the simple-minded hard worker who lures the demigod from the depths with the beauty of her singing and her songs, winning blessings for the human world.

I was really in a funk on the night of Halloween, overwhelmed with dread. We'd just been hit by Sandy and I had no idea what was really going on throughout the city. For the last 24 hours the low lying areas of our city had been grated in an unrelenting atmospheric Cuisinart. Somehow at some point in the night some part of me worked out the thing I needed to remember: it's never the circumstances that cause us to suffer, it's our interpretation of them. We are never defeated by circumstances unless we agree to be.

I'm so happy that Occupy Sandy and all the other relief organizations are still working magic in helping people recover. They reinforce that lesson that doesn't always go down easy: We are only victims if we agree to be, because there is a part of us that is, always, undefeatable.  Maybe that's what Buddhists mean when they speak of Vajra. Perhaps other traditions have another way of saying it?

Dark Night

A few days before the Hurricane, and a few days before Halloween I watched Dark Knight with my family on my son's insistence. I couldn't believe how creepy some parts of it were, I still can't. The heart of the movie though, the device in which neither boat can bring itself to blow the other up, was very bright indeed.

I have been thinking about the darkness that some here in NY are enduring, living in buildings without power and heat for over a week now. The need is great to help them and let them know that they aren't alone in this, and I have seen so many people do this. You would think that in times of such scarcity people would be imprisoned by the thought "it's either your needs or mine." That doesn't seem to be the case.

The case is that there seem to be a tremendous amount of people who make no distinction between another's suffering and their own.

So if evil wanted to mix things up here, to see what we'd do to each other, to bring us down to its level, the opposite has happened. The brightest light does shine in the darkness. I hope the governors of the city and country are swooning over the beauty of these generous citizens, who've so vigorously stepped in to help and who, though here on earth, already seen to live in heaven.

Still Reeling

Post Sandy, I'm not sure how people's needs are being met, by gov't organizations, private organizations, or by willing citizens. Most calls for help that I'm hearing are community based and inpsiring. It will be very interesting to study the responses once the air clears, but it i far from clearing. I'd like to hear more from the gov't in praise of all that citizens have taken upon themselves to help those in need.

Here's a map via SandyCareRelief of local drop off points for supplies and support. Maybe it needs updates?

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=200993660341497007383.0004cdb1584fffe515df4

Under the Undertaker

I believe this facade was obscured by the facing of the funeral home which was recently closed. I don't know how long it has been exposed, not for long I think. I saw it yesterday when I left my bunker for the first time in days. I wonder what M.J. Smith and Sons was in its day. I was also surprised to see the cafe on Windsor had open, housed in a pretty little vintage storefront in which I'd once gotten a haircut, but most recently had been a living space or studio I think.

These were not the kinds of changes I expected to see in the neighborhood when I went out. The overturned trees, on the other hand, did not surprise me.

Red Circles

I had photographs taken of the inside of my eyes on Joralemon Street, at Dr. McGroarty's office. They applied the medicine that dilates the eyes and sat me in a dim hallway the color of putty while the medicine did its work. The color of the wall in front of which they sat me was beige, brown, pinkish, greyish and my vision a complete blur that added a universe of subtle points of color to the quiet stew of color, lighter at the bottom, darker near the ceiling. I had been told to keep my eyes open, but not to read or look at any phone, so after a while I noticed a shiv of pink to the left of the wall, a slim delicate blurred angle of pink that came alive in a field of pulsating warm grey.

 During the exam there was an array of lights. An acid green light that pulsed to red, hot stripes of magenta against my eyelids interrupted by squares of fiery yello, red lights to stare at with one eye, white lights to stare at with one eye, a blinding flash as the camera threw light into the cavity of my eyes. Chalulim. Watch the needle, they'd said, to still my eye for the capture. Afterward, as I looked away a large rose tinted circle lay over all I saw.

 As the doctor explained my situation to me I was distracted by his tie, printed with pointalist designs reminiscent of the floaters that slip through my field of vision, and the thing in my eye, the threatening choroidal nevus, that has caused the worry. He showed me photos of the inside of my eyes, printouts of red hot orbs that look a lot like photos of the sun exhibiting solar activity. A good argument for sun worship. Inside out suns looking at suns, integrally integrated. One of my eyes seems to be erupting in some kind of flare that made a circle of hot yellow points circling a greyish crater, as if a meteorite had shot through the atmosphere and somehow landed inside my eye. I will be getting a second opinion from Dr. Shier, to see if the crater in the Northwest of my retina is a danger to my vision or my life, or a harmless internal abysm.

Watch the needle, still your eyes. I saw another needle on Fulton as the spike of the Fort Greene Column came into view, capped with an oracular basin like those on White's columns at Bartel Pritchard. The finial was straight up, straight ahead. I never realized how the concourse of Willoughby frames the monument to the dead lying in Brooklyn's original park so perfectly. But the framing did not help to remind me of 11,500 starved colonists silent beneath it. It was hard enough to look the horizon straight in the eye with my pupils so wide open.

Patience

In a cookie from last night's Number 1 Garden delivery, "Genius is patience." Patience, at least as an idea, has grown in depth and width considerably in the last month. It has become something like the Met, with various mezzanines and stories housing extensive galleries. Many of those exhibits had caught fire and been hosed down repeatedly. I'll need to go over them again very slowly and carefully many more times. Or maybe it's better to call it a book, or a neighborhood full of books, all of which had been left out in the rain.

escape

hazel nuts

Thanks to the neighbors on the corner of Vanderbilt and Prospect for increasing my collection of world folklore, I'm thrilled to have come across what they no longer had any use for. I found exactly what I was looking for. Alls I can say is Katie Crackernuts!

evening practice

A rare thing happened yesterday when I was walking the dog last night down E. 2nd Street at around 6pm, while many other people just home from work and school also walked their dogs. I imagine that in the kitchens some were busy at their stoves. I can't know that for sure, I didn't smell anything at all, and a good thing too, because it would have made me hungry. It was possible to tell some of what those inside the houses were up to, though, from the way the empty street became a tunnel of massive plane trees that resonated with the sound of piano ringing from the sitting rooms inside. One played Oh Holy Night at the East end of the block, then towards the West, a classical piece I can't name but which none the less brought me to tears. Somewhere in the middle, a few phrases of saxophone coming out of a house that seemed too small for the sound. It was sad to leave the strange blind theater the street had become, where the instruments and their songs seemed so much bigger than the houses that held them, and the players remained completely anonymous. It was, I suppose, another instance of the generous offerings the people of Brooklyn often leave in front of their houses.

Cleft Ridge Arch

If life is a bridge, birth and death are tunnels. These, the most intimate moments in life, are as shrouded in amnesia as this, the Cleft Ridge Arch, is shrouded in the drones of all the musicians who've played there.