Landing concords

As the  opulent concord crashes

a cyclic solar system concords

in illusory geometry…

strumming the heart with harmony

a blinking  moon’s method

to refract wisdom’s white

in red holey halos; sight

tempting serpents to twist t’wards

the secret symbolic eye

I?   Oh!   U….nothing

Mothing into the light

consumed

by and with luminosity

Blooming without resume

In and to the night

honey sweet sugar dumpling

honey sweet sugar dumpling chilli hot lovin super spice darling pie, you spark my ignition fuelling a revving rose garden engine at my deep heart centre, circulating sumptuous endorphenic juices from the base of my spine to the rays of my crown. I ma so very Awe Fully rather shamelessly grateful for every moment with you and even for the titillating anticipation in between.  You are most welcome anytime whatsoever to pleasantly disturb me with smiles or growls in waking or dreams or whatever you deems necessary for your most prosperous fully enveloped earth pacifying, soul wrenching, mind bending and body clenching satisfaction.

Hai quad

An orange oak blows the wind

surfing the clouds

with kites and Ferris

wheel

bombed church rebuilds

on windmill horizons

as apartments fence

loud trees

The river tries on a new bridge

Swallowing rain to sew

states’ seams

here I seem to sit

trying to pretend I know

what this

mind map means

E3 Refugee

Encouraged by the Benevolent Three

(I) endeavour to set (others) free

with examples from the lineage tree

(I)  exude compassionate energy

Enlightening depths of the cyclic Sea

Pursuing the guru’s morality

to perceive the roots of reality

And in the Now, enter eternity

Examining speech, mind and body

to exit e-go most exquisitely

and escape empty externality

Dresden Nights

A tattoo wounded musical warrior

Demonstrates dance therapy to a lost soul

Whilst a womanly wolf is set free with words

The shaved pierced punk pages through consciousness

As an info-techie shows sentient verse

To a Zen-zapped rainbow Goth with velvet legs

Generous junkies, gypsies and gentiles don’t judge

On the garage beat of broken bus benches

Their depart gets them spiraling down to God

Soaked in Iroquois smoke, mangos and Om tea

They float on Jethro’s flute telling Marrakech

Of religious freedom and painful beauty

The nights wondering through the musical maze

When eclectic souls dare braving the cold haze

Can all but compare to the prearranged days

BECOMING AUTUMN

OH WHAT IF WE WERE WORN LEAVES IN THE WIND

 CHARMING COLOUR CHANGE LIKE WEATHER DOES MOODS

FLOATING FANCY FREE ON OUR CYCLIC JOURNEY

BORN FROM THE ASHES’ DUST AND BACK TO ITS ROOTS

OH WHAT IF WE WERE BUT  ONE WONDERFUL WAVE

TIED TO THE TIDE OF THE WAX –WANING MOON

WEAK TO THE WILL OF AWSOME AUTUMN CLOUDS

WEEPING WETNESS ON WATER-WANTING WORLDS

OH WHAT IF WE WERE BUT FLAME FLICKERING FIRE

AMBIGUOUS AMBIENT AMBER; BURNING

APPARENT ANGER OF BLACK-BRINGING APPETITE

YET ALSO EATING THE DARK COLDNESS OF NIGHT

OH WHAT IF WE WERE BUT WHITE SANDSTONE WALLS

WEATHERING AWAY WITH THE WIND AND WATER

APPEARING FIRM YET ALWAYS FADING

INDIFFERENT TO ECHOS OF PRAISE AND BLAME

Cosmic Dancer

Galactic groove, spin free your load

let sever corporeal crutches

in spacious scenes find new abode

where only subtle sense touches

Tranquil seas of sweet release

meet golden shores of true love’s beach

fed on fragrant fruit of inner peace

warm wisdom’s wind is heard to teach

Burgeoning bliss without fear

spirals upward as you dance

trans-ego’s angels become clear

when you open up to the chance

Travel light; body breath essence

takes flight on heavenly sitar

flow'ring fields of luminescence
shoot stars, in finite as you are

Beautiful suffering sea

Elms marching, fighting, meditating…
in a green and white sea of daisies
Forced witness to the arrival of
four lion-carriagged new-born stars
along royal ebony carpet-ways
A melancholy soundtrack mirrors them
En route to bejewled turquoise horizens
to squatt on mossy stone thrones
As trees jump to their death over chalk cliffs
their corpses used as fantacy photo props
like Northeastern waves and winds eb and blow
so a broken heart is healed as it lets go

verses for the collective record

So…

Waking up under planetary red

I slowly slipped out of heavenly bed,

as a silent but violent voice said…

‘your lust lotus has symbolically bled

and such chastity as yours is for the dead.

So forget all the awareness you’ve bred,

it is time for the beast to be fed;

forget too the moral life you’ve led

lest all vital life juice goes to your head’

Martian men coveting Venetian girls

in a post-moral hedonistic world.

But while the Sufi dervish still twirls

a tidal wave of life can unfurl

So don’t give into to the suffocating flow

let your cosmic potentiality glow

Quantum gravitation has got me downed

as in beginingless time I go round.

 While universal mind methods may abound,

A unifying theory is not yet found,

In consumer confusion I’m drowned

my deadened senses they try to astound,

and since material amassing hounds,

while dogmatic cat holics are crowned,…

the song of merely being can’t resound

to show my worth I advertise a brand

and on white  3rd world beaches I am tanned

but while the price of the world seems at hand

the value of compassion cannot be canned

So don’t sieve-through the overwhelming woe

try letting all selfish conceptions go

I can’t seem to understand what is meant

When  money is lent  replacing  employment

with the  mega -machines that we invent.

Atomic spaceships from our world are sent

while at the same time in debt we repent

And though we say our anger needs a vent

The broken beast of burden’s back is bent

And we ask ourselves, where all the love went

So Mr. Yang suppresses Mrs. Ying

She must be used like any other thing

Mother nature, bear my fruits, wear my ring

Live within my cage, and best try to sing

‘So what’ says the killer on death row

‘my mom never had any love to show’

The flash of genius that gets one free:

The Centre Of The Matrix Is Me!

But when caught between the monk  and  monkey

we forget who caused this  originally

objects appear lost in a sub at sea.

One could be led to live chaotically

Or beg forgiveness from a deity

who is stuck in the same  causality

pointing fingers at reflections, blindly

when force-fed fiction, we need not swallow

in ignorant mires we needn’t wallow

when we realise judgements are hollow

Galaxy-shattering effects follow

So don’t live your life like you don’t know

the seeds of destruction that we sow

Cape Town Street Art Photolog:

I have been admiring and snapping up some of the eclectic street art in cape town that locals may be familiar with and friends further away may appreciate

enjoy

vipassana 2: of boredom, back-ache, love and light

what to say after 10 days of silent retreat with ten hours of body observation? The overall responce I have been giving friends, family and colleagues that ask is that is was frightfully boring. the technique is very straightforward...3days of breath awareness and six days of scanning the body's sensations trying not ot react with the usual instintive clinging to or hating the respective feelings and rather to have an impersonal disinterest in them understanding that they too will pass like everything else in our spacio-temporal world. Not to say that this is easy, its damn near impossible to focus on that alone, even for somebody with meditation experience, its more perhaps that i have become far more of a creature of comfort and hyper-stimulation like so many people in the world.

The combination of hightened focus on the body and the body's increasing discomort at the prolonged sitting...makes for an intense mental workout. Add to this the very repetitive and sometimes overtly dogmatic 'universalism' talks on the technique as well as off-key droning chanting by the main teacher: SN Goenka blaring from video and speakers for probably two hours out of the ten per day; and the whole thing can be quite traumatic. And traumatic it was, particularly for Thekla my partner and Kathy her step-mom, that accompanied me on the retreat and though they both have years of various meditation behind them, have never called themselves Buddhist as I have.  I am also judging things from a different school of Buddhism, mostly Tibetan, which places far more emphasis on using compassion for all living beings and a desire to help them as its main focus. Vipassana which survives of from the pali-teachings of Buddha used in Burma, uses personal liberation as the primary focus and benefit to thers as far more ancilliery.

All three of us had some form of insight from the practice but all felt that we could have done it in long weekend and that 10 days of Goenka would be more likely to scare people away from meditation than get them going. On the sixth night when I was unable to sleep from being hyper alert and being quite stiff from 60 hours of meditation, I settled down into a beautiful visualisation of a figure 8 of love/compassion and light/wisdom passing up and down my body synchronsied with my breath and gradually untying and disolving the knots around my central energy channel. Though Goenka would probably not approve of such abstractions, it was a shifting point for me in terms of how the Buddhas teachings can become lived bodily experiences. And it must be said that the technique is benefitting people since many thousands around the world keep going back and there are over a 1000 and growing such retreat centres worrldwide all finansed by courese that are given for only a donation that the practitioner can afford.

Now with a couple of days of reflection and having kept up a daily meditative routine for about 2 weeks, I am a little less critcal. Although I am not using the Vipassana technique as Goenka suggests (i.e. no mantras, nor vizualisations) the scanning and not reacting to my bodys impulses has merged well into the fibre of my purification mantra visualisation practice. I have never been particularly good at maintaing a  daily meditation routine and it feels as if the ball is finally rolling and as if there is more of a continuum in my awareness than with my sporadic meditative past. It occurs to me that I was in a completely different headspace when I did a 10 day Vipassana course four years ago. And if anything I have become a lot more scattered and considerably more over-burdened with ideas since then.  This in fact was one of the resaons for wanting to return to the austerity of the Worchester mountain retreat centre an hour outside of Cape Town. This is in retrospect also the reason why it was that much more difficult this time.

Thekla also seems to have turned over a new leaf in our relationship, with a renewed joyous effort for our life together. Kathy, who gives us a weekly yoga class, also seems to have woven some of the equanimity to sensations practice into her teaching... So in closing, no regrets for having begrudgingly suffered through it; any perseverence in my life is an accomplishment and things have shifted. So I appologise the universe at large for my rampant bemoaning of Goenka and the Technique, I think that it is a very useful tool for thought addicts like myself to become liberated,  if not neccesarily one that I am disciplined enough to maintain in its philosphically minimalist austerity.

Poetree be free

Such that my poetic musings may inspire and that my intellectual property can be tossed to fire, here, have a few peices of my marshy mental mire....

Add caption