220,000 stones

What loose limb of the world can, unhinged,
so quick dislodge so many
from their habit of sunlight?
What terrible womb births an epic destruction
that renders mercy moot, mute, mouthless?

We've seen these vagrant factors of the earth divide,
the rest of us,
grounded elsewhere by no firm design of our own.
We can only watch this weighty culmination,
the dire momentum of a crushing tide
whose rumbling now will always
echo in our ears,
like shells with a belly full of brine.
Our hands flounder through
some futile choreography of sympathy, empty,
while unsentimental water ebbs.

If only there were a pencil
that could rewrite this damage,
a bit of India rubber to erase
these upswept fathoms of the sea.

The sea,
the sea:
that infertile mass whose dark and roiling currents
one day boiled past the limits of the surface
to vomit chaos on the heads of lingerers,
building for a greedy number
out of mud and bone debris
the impractical architecture of dying.

^

the matope people

• Matope (mah-TOE-pay): Swahili for “mud.”
• A golem in Kabbalistic lore is a manlike creature, formed from organic material (like earth), and animated by mystical incantation (galem is Hebrew for “lump," or "raw material"). Erasing one letter from the Hebrew word for truth ("ameth": part of the spell that creates the golem) turns it into the word for death ("meth": the word that destroys the golem).
• Mzungu nipale (mm-ZOONG-goo nee-PAH-lay): Swahili for something like “whitey, give me more.” It’s considered to be a rude or offensive thing to say.
• Desert natives in Africa do actually harvest water from rocks: they bury large stones and mark their location; they later dig them up and shave them to produce dust. Squeezing the dust allows the water to emerge, which they drink by letting it trickle down the thumb and into the mouth.

The fineness of dust makes the rain-made mud
a tense kind of slick – sticky, and weighty.
The people walk,
and each step makes a scapular bowl
in the giving ground,
while the collars of half-dried clay on their feet
leave a trail of distorted haloes
which the mind finds shapes in –
a prairie dog, a zebra, a lion –
marking the dry floor with a trail of myth.
They are all shamans,
making animal golems as they walk,
each step pressing the creatures into being,
bringing them back from some cold geologic center
whose origins are far removed
from this hot sky and this blade sun.

Displaced children, golems themselves
molded from the same mud
(if the pale streaks across
their baked-black skin speak true),
walk with a spell of death overhead.
It makes them fierce,
and they've no mother to gentle them,
and no father to point them the way,
and no walls to hold their memories.
Some will beat each other with rocks,
and some will never bother to speak
since thin, crustal words cannot possibly
embrace the corpulence of their grief and rage.
Instead they run,
leaving empty footprints rimmed with earth,
the very earth of their being,
losing along the way pieces of themselves
to impossible zebras and sleeping lions.

The white one weeps,
brown straight hair gleaming in cornrows
with clay beads nestled in them.
The little shaman-golems shaped like children
say to her, tense, leaping, circling,
“ Mzungu, mzungu nipale!”
but she has no answer,
and they cannot conjure more from her.
She knows she has no alibi for her abundance,
that birthright of the West which has followed her
across all 10,000 miles she’s traveled
to this selvage of civilization,
this first frontier of dust and woundedness.
She cannot give them even the smallest piece
of what they’ve lost, but she tries anyway,
and this is something.

Somehow, in the rain and dirt,
there might be, must be,
some alchemy of resurrection,
a freeing syllable which looses these golems
from their obligation to pain
and lets them for the first time be

just children, muddied –
pulling rocks from under desert,
drinking water squeezed from dust.

^

sun-spare and wondering

I went walking in a damaged wood
where words like toppled trees felt wrong
and listless, with no memory of their own.
The bisect trunks stood gaping,
silent in their faulty rapture.
And there was me, would-be haruspic
ashamed to read the viscera
of their philosopher-map innards.
There were songs in them when they died,
jigs of wind and epic skies,
ballads of gravity and succulent light.
If all the trees fall, there'll be nothing left
to hear or write about.
We'll be left sun-spare and wondering,
except in staunch and woody memory
(no green thing in its day).

^

this is how it is
(click to listen)

no genteel current,
this slow magma in the mantle of my chest -
it's a perishing flow, hot and breathless,
your glowred bootprints improbable
in the grey crust of what's left of me.

the weight of you, profound -
gravity's amorous badboy -
I fell relentless
into that windward term,
that silvered epoch's gloom...
a beach-junk whale with diving dreams.

^

 

 

instant manifestation and multidimensionality
published in the online library of the Field Center

Field training students sometimes think that consciousness should be able to manifest what we intend (or something better) instantaneously, as Jesus and various yogis and bodhisattvas have done throughout the ages. The theory seems to break down in practice, however, in those situations where the desired factual manifestation doesn’t happen right away, leaving us to wonder if there’s something wrong with the theory, or with the way we applied it. How many of us have experienced feeling in our gut and our heart our newly shifted intention, chosen wittingly and without contradiction, along with an intuitive conviction that we’re giving the Field full responsibility and freedom to say “Yes” to us – yet still found ourselves waiting for the facts to come into line? Assuming that all our unwitting intentions actually were cleared, and understanding that the “something better,” as the theory emphasizes, would be recognizable as such, why the wait?

A lot of people believe things happen for a reason. I don’t. I believe things happen for many reasons. This belief was born during an interchange between my father and me about a decade and a half ago. I was bringing an adolescent understanding to the question of why my parents had divorced after a relatively short marriage, and suggested that maybe they had married merely to have me. Dad pointed out the self- centeredness of this idea, and his tone jarred me to a broader view of the universe. So when he and I were comparing manifestation stories last weekend, it occurred to me similarly how simplistic it is to think that things happen only for the reasons we can see. If we’re all One, all Field, then ultimately no event (such as intention and corresponding manifestation in fact) can take place in an isolated context. There must be many, perhaps countless interconnections of purpose that remain hidden from Particle vision and consideration. On what basis, then, can we assume that we are in a position to predict when an intention will or should manifest, e.g., instantaneously? Speaking theoretically (and borrowing from chaos theory), we would be able to predict the monsoon if we were aware of every nuance, every causal element, every shade of purpose affected by the beat of the butterfly’s wing. The idea that manifestation ideally happens instantly doesn’t allow for the multidimensionality of reality. For every intention, there exists an unknown and non-constant number of factors that must all be fulfilled in order to manifest a certain (or better) outcome.

The Field’s efficiency is infinite, accomplishing many tasks with every action or event, and I believe this is why intentions (even wholehearted ones) don’t always manifest instantaneously in the world. Requiring or even expecting instantaneous manifestation is a counterintention in that it asserts time as a condition of fulfillment. If we open our hearts and our hands, and realize that perfect fulfillment is always at work, it’s no longer important when an outer manifestation occurs, because we trust that the Field knows when it’s time, when all factors are ripe for manifesting. This “hands-off” approach to intending is key – it allows us to embody the idea of “letting go” which is a must for conscious creating. This way of looking at intention and manifestation opens our heart, creating room for all we intend in our lives, and making it impossible to live in greed, fear, lack, or any of those things we might wish to change in our experience. Indeed, if we live the compassionate life (and compassion is only one of the benefits of realizing the multidimensionality of events), it becomes unimportant when or how our intentions manifest, because we are open to the greatest range of realities, greater even than we can intend. We then find that our greed, fear, and lack fall away from us like the veils of dreams upon waking.

^

command performance
published in the online library of the Field Center

We Field training students, so aware of Particle limitation, tend to think of the Field as an all-seeing, all-knowing, and therefore, superior force. This conclusion about Particle inferiority is both misleading and detrimental to our understanding of radical responsibility and creatorship. It’s more accurate and much more useful to think of Particle and Field coexisting symbiotically, each offering the other something it can’t provide for itself. We must then reevaluate the idea of Particle limitation and acknowledge that it’s not only valuable, it’s necessary. Without the Particle’s beautiful ability to limit (i.e., to say “no” to counterintention), the Field has no direction with which to manifest meaningfully in our lives. We find that the Particle’s role in shifting realities is not as passive as we might have thought; although it is accurate to say we allow the body-sense of a new version of ourselves for a manifestation to show, this practice is not as passive as the language used to describe it.

We can explore the symbiotic nature of Particle and Field by likening the Particle to an orchestral conductor and the Field to the musicians he directs. The conductor is not inferior because he holds no instrument; neither are the musicians superior because they make noise. They are two parts of a whole, and each is essential to producing a symphony. This means we Particles must recognize that our existence is useful and not something to be overcome or denied. Particle limitation is not an obstacle to love, prosperity, oneness, joy, or whatever we would manifest in our lives; it is the vehicle. Failing to see the Particle experience this way reveals a core counterintention that prevents our witting intentions from manifesting. We must see our Particle nature not as a hindrance but as integral to the process of creating before we can truly embrace creatorship.

Once we understand this, we can adjust the way we view intention and manifestation. Intending then becomes directing the Field in what to manifest for us; the Field only knows how to say “okay” – a sort of universal Yes – which is a fine way to be if you’re an omniscient omnipresent force, but extremely unhelpful if you’re a Particle. It is Particle nature that perceives the diversity, richness and variety of our existence: We can see a direction to the flow of events because we’ve set up a limitation called time. We can see separate objects and move through the physical world because we’ve set up a limitation called space. Experience exists for the Particle because of its ability to limit. While the issue of boundaries is irrelevant to the Field, these limitations of time and space are necessary preconditions for manifestation; beyond these fundamental forms of experience in the world, limitations are inherent in deliberate creating: each “yes” to a chosen body-sense (version of self) implies our commitment to say “no” to anything that contradicts it. Directing the Field is not unlike teaching an infant that there are certain boundaries that are best not crossed – like not putting our fingers in electrical sockets, for example. Fences do indeed make good neighbors if you’re a Particle!

We say in Field training that in order to manifest something we first must intend it by embodying that version of us for whom it is already present and real. The body-sense is a tool for changing our ontological belief, that is, what we hold to be real. But rare is the student who realizes how literally this practice may be undertaken. If we consider a frustrated mother who complains that her unruly child never listens to her, yet the mother in turn never listens to her child, we can see readily that the child was never shown how to listen – that little one is not being willfully unruly, she is being effortlessly unruly, and is merely manifesting the reality the parent has the unwitting role of believing in. If Mother has the body-sense of not-listening, she is unwittingly directing the child how to not-listen, too. Applying Field training to this situation, we’d say the woman has manifested that which she takes to be real – that is, a state of "not-listening." If she truly wants to change her child’s behavior, she will have to take radical responsibility and teach by her example the reality of listening. The child, receptive and ready to correspond, will take the direction and manifest that reality. We can see in this that enbodying an intention really amounts to being a good role model!

When we truly become the creators we are, it is clear that the Particle directs the Field by its example, exactly the way a parent teaches a child, exactly the way a conductor directs his orchestra – he leads the orchestra, embodying the music with passion, holding the notes in his heart and his hands, and symphonies manifest.

^