Studies
Life is a series of adventures: the doing, being, having, getting, losing and letting go, all make their imprint. We are constantly challenged, blocked, aided, molded, refined, and stretched, while our eyes are opened and our minds assess the drama of it all. We each as individuals must find our place in all dramas of life: family, culture, mainstream society, politics, careers and love. The cycles revolve constantly and we are always vulnerable. Nearly all of us long to know the "why" and "how" of our happiness and our failures. Therefore, we must study systems including histories, philosophies, the hard and social sciences, the arts and human societies. Most important we must study ourselves, for the ultimate pleasure which extends from knowing oneself and holding oneself in higher regard is self respect. We must study the scriptures, the Wisdom books, the lives of the saints and martyrs, the church, and the works and ways of the world. Finally, we must study love, the creation and created beings, for all life teaches.



Inheritors

The Remote . . . the entrance into the darkened cellar . . . is there one soft space in all the world? Are we Inheritors, lives anchored to icons . . . are we such fragile things of words and images that nothing is new-born? Why is re-creation a solitary love, and why is freedom now so strange?

The tranquil place . . . the darkened cellar . . . streets under threat of thunder . . . earth-magnet relentlessly calling us from the wave . . . the winds of change are upon us . . . (if we disinherit we may fade . . . if we disinherit we may lose grace . . . if we disinherit of words and images, may we not lose all to space)?

You edge to the precipice the sound of warning bells all round . . . everything has voices, everything edges you on. But the mirage; that slight inkling of hope, of dismembering the semaphores, of restoring the pauses; this is the trespass the inheritors will not claim . . .

The bitter irony of it; the transitory images that hardened language cannot seize; the short-lived desolation of reality, that extraordinary images are mere flashes, like a breeze powerless to last before the breaths of voyagers customed by needs to yearn, to need to hold them in their hands . . .

We choose either Light, that is time, sound, and suffering; or Darkness, pure, and impure consciousness . . . knowing we may never know the true virtues, just near-meanings . . . but surviving nonetheless like parasites by the rare and sometimes unexpected, desperate acts of "Holding On" . . .

We choose either Light, that is time, sound, and suffering; or Darkness, pure, and impure consciousness . . . knowing we may never know the true virtues, just near-meanings . . . but surviving nonetheless like parasites by the rare and sometimes unexpected, desperate acts of "Holding On" . . .

Rare Beauty is a poet "holding on" . . . inside us is a city of ghosts and images continuously being born in paths and by-paths, in ruins, myths, and mysteries. Inside us is a city of silence, of harmony and unending noise. Inside is like this: the feeling of dream-pieces and from a single window, a kindly visitor who envisions all: thereal world, literate; and the world in figures. Their magnetic reaction is all images of harmony in a single thing increasing . . . . . is all images invisible, and pointed toward Healing.

Emblems crawl away in haste, leaving broad legends cross-legged in their place . . . a host of guardians, when real FEELING should suffice. They drag us deceptively from truth, spreading flutes and drones of awe-filling preeminence where once a single honest cry told all. "Do Not Come To Me Retorting, Exhorting, In Chocolated Tones! DO NOT SPARE ME!" "Who is afraid of it -- The lightening flash of ANGER?" My anger is gutterals in agony. The flashing is their fire setting free! And outrage may seem pointless bliss, but is my honor being swept from me!"

Ah, when words and images are no more. We slip from our replicas and columns to the incubus-illusion: the shadows give the bark of the tree a human figure and the waterfall plays its cascade that begs to "let us love you with every ripple of the mind." Light loses power in eruption, no longer fixed it separates; punctuates the then and now as the burden of memory must begin its wrestings with discoveries, with its finds. The landscape comments on itself; Paz said "is it ironic that a leaf should think itself in leaves?"* or that a stone is embryo and émigré of primordial solitude? or that the Shoreline's gesture of unevenness is the impulse of the wave?

. . . and the tambourine cries holiness
. . . and the piano, serenade
. . . and the drum "we dance"
. . . and largo, adagio, staccato, pizzicato, "see how florid it rains!"
. . . and the muffled drum roll, death
. . . and golden trumpets, the uplifted voice
. . . and the taste of rust in blood
. . . and the demons, night . . . and the spirits, day
. . . and the holy ghost, death . . . and the holy ghost, love
. . . and a single flower in a field of graves, the impulse to be brave?"

INHERITORS!

ALL IS MEDLODIOUS, HAVE YOU SEEN THE DANCE?
ALL IS SENSUAL, HAVE YOU FELT THE DANCE?

"Sweet Peace that delivers us from lunatics . . .
Rebellion and Order are combatants in the streets . . .
am I too long in the sun? Without words and images . . .
is there an end to all stories? an end to all song?"


*Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre