Shorelines

ego tells me to draw conclusions…shore up my indignation or my melodrama, the one where I’m left out, ignored or otherwise tricked into a situation not best for me…the one where I’m enticed onto the dance floor, courage of a wallflower conjuring possibility…the one where I get there and it’s empty…the one where the latest story plays out ancient history…here, another loss…there, another loss…

see, there now. I can legitimize the pout, the hardening heart; the saga continues.

heart tells me to stay in the game…shore up my courage, stand naked, hold out for better days…perpetuate the script of constancy and hope…keeping afloat fantasies made from valid yearnings…distorting reality…one more swig from the bottle, just one…

see, there it is. I can accept and continue heralding heartfulness in the face of hard, harsh brick wall non-response; the saga continues.

mind tells me to get real…how much more obvious does it have to be before you see, it’s the same dumb sham…you’ve been played…you played yourself too…wake the hell up, chick…run fast and far…fuck ’em…be done and gone…besides, no proof of your perspective as valid, no proof of possibilities good, bad or otherwise, no proof, no nothing but silence… and silence speaks. see how much it meant? nada…nowhere…next?

and now, finally. I can dignify my stupidity by showing I see it, by throwing myself into a race in the opposite direction. there, the saga stops (nah, it continues).

but the shores shape and carve out the landmass… the mist makes feasts and evaporates… myriad possibilities, likelihoods, comfortings and abandonments form character, painting stories on soul’s terrain…somewhere between the melodramatic maybes, foolhardy courage and pessimistic realism is the song of a universe whisking us all onto dance floors we’ve not begun to fathom … and while I can’t stop the tides or discourage another etching on my backside, frontside or otherwise, can’t force justice, or awareness or love or … happy endings… I can let go and let it be as I move on, away from conclusions…embracing the way of nature … ‘though it seems fairly obvious sometimes…

all I know is this: I don’t know. I see all the possibilities in situations left languishing, cut short violently or otherwise aborted by unfortunate events. but. I don’t know.

move me, life, beyond judging what is not mine to judge… move me, great waters, into the floating real of what I can do for me right here, right now in this warm and gentle sea…

photo by ryan mcguire - bells design
photo by ryan mcguire – bells design

Truthful to the End, Robin Williams

Robin Williams ended his life. And it reverberates across the world, this collective uproar of loss realized. Images, endless scrolls and screens of Robin Williams’ memories and tributes. His face speaks something other than tragedy. His presence, as long as we had the privilege of it, upheld a priceless gift. It’s hard to reconcile that he would find it within himself to end it all, that someone who has made such a profound impact on humanity just by being funny and real, spontaneous and crazy, that he would take that away, decide it’s not worth another second.

But something in me feels defensive of him and of his legacy, that it not be diminished by his inability to continue. Why is that? He made a bold statement in his dying. On the one hand, he has every right to choose the time, the how. On the other hand, he’s commenting and saying that no matter how much acclaim you earn or how loved you are, if you’re not able to reach it within yourself, that source of love, all the acclaim in the world won’t save you, won’t keep you alive another second longer. He’s saying it’s just that tough. And it’s too precious to bear sometimes. Awareness and the artistry of unusual expressiveness comes with a price. Intensity cuts deep, sees more than any one soul can manage alone and if there’s not one who can share that awareness, the desolation pounds a deafening cry of seeming futility.

When a person takes his life, he is saying the one thing he will do is the one thing he can do…end the agony. Would that we, humanity, possessed much more skill in discerning when to stay with those who are so abandoned all they can do is leave us. Stay and break all the rules of propriety or discourse and insist on piercing the lie that another second of living is one too many.

Russell Brand said it better: “What platitudes then can we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was? That fame and accolades are no defence against mental illness and addiction? That we live in a world that has become so negligent of human values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves? That we must be more vigilant, more aware, more grateful, more mindful? That we can’t tarnish this tiny slice of awareness that we share on this sphere amidst the infinite blackness with conflict and hate?

That we must reach inward and outward to the light that is inside all of us? That all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore?”

So it is…there are those who remind us we have so much farther to reach and deeper to dig before we have become so alive, soulfully relentless that not one would dare entertain the solution of suicide. 

Slipping on Daylight

chasing daylight blind,
slip covering soft on soul…
my eyes failed to see.

unending shimmer
blinding clarity’s assault,
suggested love flow.

and within me now
the seeing reveals truth’s hide.
cover me quickly…

relocate heart within,
and behind the bars of life’s
intended refuge.

 

j. ruth kelly, 2014
j. ruth kelly, 2014

 

 

Something Deeper…

” … you start to go for something deeper. You start to go to meet another human being in truth. And truth is scary. Truth has bad breath at times; truth is boring; truth burns the food; truth is all the stuff. Truth has anger; truth has all of it. And you stay in it and you keep working with it and you keep opening to it and you keep deepening it.” Ram Dass (on soul mates and love)

 

To the Outermost Bound…

“These immense spaces of creation cannot be spanned by our finite powers; these great cycles of time cannot be lived even by the life of a race. And yet, small as is our whole system compared with the infinitude of creation, brief as is our life compared with cycles of time, we are so tethered to all by the beautiful dependencies of law, that not only the sparrow’s fall is felt to the outermost bound, but the vibrations set in motion by the words that we utter reach through all space and the tremor is felt through all time.” Maria Mitchell

j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved, 2014
j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved, 2014

 

Amen, Sister…

From Amanda Palmer’s blog, a response to a reaction to a young lady much twerked about. Wait, I mean talked about…

“I want to live in a world where the internal dialogue of a woman’s brain has evolved to the point where a female performer can wear a sex-pot outfit and, instead of the all-too-common head-chatter chorus of ‘UNFAIR! MANIPULATED! WEAK! MANIPULATIVE! EVIL!,’ she dons her sexy costume and hears internal voices screaming ‘FAIR! POWERFUL! PLAYFUL! BRAVE! SEXY!’ You know…you go girl. But not ‘you go girl and be manipulated by the man, or manipulate the men in your wake’. just…’you go girl and wear whatever the fuck you want. And play smart.’

I want to live in a world where WE as women determine what we wear and look like and play the game as our fancy leads us, army pants one minute and killer gown the next, where WE decide whether or not we’re going to play games with the male gaze and the starry-eyed hard-ons that can make men so easy to manipulate. But seriously, let’s all play the game together, with a wink and a nudge…so we don’t hurt each other. If men and women don’t have a constantly open dialogue about how we do and don’t (or should and shouldn’t) manipulate and play with each other, we all lose. We are all fragile humans with little time on this beautiful, sexually-charged, ecstatic planet. Let’s share it to the fullest  extent that we can and make the playing field for all of us the size of the whole earth.

In other words, let’s give our young women the right weapons to fight with as they charge naked into battle, instead of ordering them to get back in the house and put some goddamn clothes on.” Amanda Palmer

Spot-on supreme read found here: http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20131003/

 

Dialogue

“Communication has been ailing in the human race for a long time and Dialogue is concerned with that. But the primary purpose of Dialogue is not to communicate. It is much deeper. It addresses the blocks in communication, not merely to understand them, but to meet them directly. It is aimed at seeing resistances to communication. In Dialogue we are ready to raise topics serious enough to cause trouble. But while we are talking we are interested in being aware of what’s going on inside us and between us.

The word ‘dialogue’ has many meanings and we are giving it a particular meaning. In this Dialogue we are not trying to make our points prevail or, if we are, we need to look at that. Our challenge is to see when each of us is trying to prevail, because if anybody prevails it means the dialogue has failed.” David Bohm

Dialogue?
Dialogue? (Photo by j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved)

When Does It Begin To Matter?

These times simmer us all along a story of eventual boiling, critical massness, whether we acknowledge the kitchen exists, or the stove, or the fire underneath the pot or the pot or…

We can say it doesn’t matter, that we can’t make a difference by raising our voice but how else have we made changes without shedding blood? And don’t we want to avoid that one in particular? Would we rather send troops to corrupt wars, pat them on the back with a grin, say our prayers repeatedly, send out all the best energy and hope it all works out well enough or could we maybe consider speaking the truth to established “time-honored” realities gone stagnant and toxic? Especially when those traditions quickly boot their once-revered boots, now seasoned veterans, into a purgatory of loss, of benefits soured and help non-existent. Why would anyone perpetuate such? Could we maybe ask ourselves why we see no point in voicing our opinions but have no problem supporting the send-off of troops? What perversion of truth are we embodying when we embrace such twisted contradictions of love? We can’t make a difference with our voices united in opposition to corruption but somehow we can make a difference sending young folk to their confusion if not their deaths?

And while we’re at the love shore: Why are we so in love with our dramas, our many ministrations for the injured and the cornered more than we are in love with preventing the injuries, the agonies, the worries about loved ones entrenched in “time-honored” dead end ventures? While we should never abandon our love for the wounded, it’s a vastly wicked farce of love to embrace futility of voice while clinging fiercely to our weapons of warfare and all the seeming heroics inevitable. We bind soldier to soldier on fields meant only for greed, their scuffle to keep each other alive somehow proving one man or woman can get another’s back in the sands of murky foreign purpose. We tell ourselves it justifies the futility of it all as we grin and play the romantic charade game of hide the truth. Can we not encourage our youth to occupy our own soil here in these anorexic lands where we starve out soulfulness minute by minute everyday? Not in some distant land where our presence creates enemies and problems so much more horrific than any we could have interrupted.

It’s like some sick roundy round with value, with preciousness itself. It’s like we don’t want it. We’d rather injure it, send it abroad into suicidal zones of alleged honor, duty and freedom before doing the most effective thing we can do to protect what we love, to further love itself. See, if we are real warriors, we speak the truth to centuries of corruption. We stand our ground, refusing violence. We question the powers that be and we do it endlessly until the reign of corruption ends, occupying truth, insisting on a fierce love that refuses the same old delusions and capitulations to overwhelming corruption.

When will it begin to matter? Until it does, we pose. We pose notions of care, of concern, of sincerity itself when we refuse to believe our voices can turn a tide in love, for love, as love.  How is it that our hands wielding weapons have more power than our voices sending out energy, uncovering truth, discovering purpose that embraces what matters, birthing and nurturing love? It is not so. Don’t believe there’s no point because if you believe there’s no point in a voice raised, then your belief in everything else is nowhere, nothing. Not one part of the human expression, not one movement of the body is without purpose and the fact that all the world is mostly ignorant of this truth is why we are where we are today, on the stove, working our way up to an ugly boil, refusing love itself. So, when? When does it begin to matter? And when do people realize what once stood on the edge of lands noble, possibly occupying honorable purpose, what once defended freedom is now a machine killing innocence? And no ancient semi-heroic history will redeem what is now. Only what we choose now, only when we embrace how much it matters now, only then will we stand a chance of avoiding devastating loss.

Mindless Americanism

Pass the pills, the great gobs of prescriptive denial, send us all along our paths surreal as we nod and grin, complicit…

Lay it all out before us, the blithely boring buffet of “heroism” won in the distant lands of those “lesser” creatures where terror matinees feature imminent threats to our alleged freedom…

As we all skip gaily bleating off the cliff, grinning our laws of attraction, never wondering why such corruption billows and balloons us all puffed up in songs and hymns and spiritual songs and…

Something so sleepy, so myopic and sludge slothful coursing through our veins as we snort this righteous indignation at any not white, not here first (wait…), not Bible-beating cleanly-seeming…

Importing bootstrap molasses for asses pounding their pulpits reducing compassion for the downtrodden, trampling any and all deemed weak, abnormal, suspicious-looking, not born with silver spoon inserted in the wide wide mouth…

Tune in and turn on the off of any soulfulness, we’re all done with frank and real, raw and feel, we got game for heaping high miles of blame on any who dare expose our truths…

Sit at our table where we’ll rally the professionals, injecting poison and gathering mutant unearthly harvest for the gaping masses of superior mindless compliance, gulping down the greed master’s meal…

See, we don’t feel, think or otherwise manage more than a cursory blank stare in the winking twinkle of this twilight of our delusion…

Enough Free People? No.

“After we protested and went to jail and then went to court and was—had a guilty verdict, right? That week, the president came to New York and said, ‘Edward Koch was one of the great mayors in the last 50 years,’ and then said, ‘Michael Bloomberg was a terrific mayor.’ Now, this is the same person saying we’ve got to care for black boys, and black boys are being intimidated, harassed, humiliated, 1,800 a day. It’s just not a matter of pretty words, Mr. President. You’ve got to follow through in action. You see, you can’t use the words to hide and conceal your mendacity, hypocrisy and the support of criminality—or enactment of criminality when it comes to drones, you see.

And the sad thing is, Sister Amy, is that we just don’t have enough free people, let alone free black people. Black people, we settled for so little, so we get a little symbolic gesture, we get a little identification, and like on MSNBC, which is part of the Obama plantation, they start breakdancing again: ‘Oh, isn’t it so wonderful? He’s really one of us. We can now wave the flag again. We can now support our mindless Americanism,’ in the language of my dear brother Maulana Karenga, intellectual that he is. No. We ought to be over against injustice, no matter what, across the board, and be vigilant about it. I don’t care what color the president or the governor or the mayor is.” — Cornel West in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now