Well.

My dear friend, my reader-who-isn’t-but-who-may-yet-be – if I told you what’s been going on, we’d be here all day.

Without ascribing a more-than-localized or cosmic significance to the doings and goings-on of my life, I’d say that things have been accelerating quickly.

Maybe, at some point, I’ll share some thoughts and stories.

Some of this, I have written down already – for myself, for others – and may share here, when the time is right, if it ever feels right.

Time is blurring a little, or time-tables.

It’s always been that way for me; without clear and concrete anchors or guide-rails to fix me in material space, one thing relative to another, I tend to lose track of what happened when; I’m on perpetual island-time, the inner-clock, syncopated, polyrhythmic metronome, of my own inner compass.

Point being – did it happen yesterday? This week? Did it start a month ago? Three years ago? In 2009? Before I was born? Does it matter? Is it just a matter of what story I’d like to tell, and how?

We have ways of cutting through these Gordian Knots, we poets and artists, emperors of our imaginal realms.

The multi-dimensional poly-glot of meaning is not unraveled, one micro-knot at a time, by the painfully laborious working of steady fingers in time; though there is a place for patient fingers working knots, I would submit that it’s in tracing the eternal circles of reverently-woven prayer knots. But that’s a different kind of unraveling – it’s not the rope that’s unraveled, but the one who holds it.

Let me cut to the quick of it, to draw just a few drops of living blood – not as a sacrifice, but to help you feel what life has been moving through me, animating me.

A quick cut with well-honed words not only gets to the heart of it, but if I draw them quickly in the right way, maybe they’ll catch a bit of light that might give something to your eye.

At Spring Forest Qigong, I got to meet all kinds of people. Recently, I put it this way:

“When I write an email to a client, or just an enquirer new to SFQ, I put my heart and soul into it. I bring all the experience of my unique being into every reply I give.

“I remember everything people tell me, and I remember the things they don’t tell me. I remember the feelings they give me, and I carry many threads of human communion like that in my heart and mind, drawing on them to weave an ever-growing tapestry of deeper connection with the people I meet and serve.

“Over the course of months and years, I get to know the inner lives of these people I’ve never met, and always do everything I can to be of service to them in the spirit of healing.”

A couple months ago, it happened that two or three clients and students who I’ve gotten to know fairly well, ever more deeply, often in the most surprising ways at the most unexpected times, all shared some poetry with me around the same time.

All three are women – two in their 70s, one in her 40s.

As you know – I write, and I’m pretty good.

But I remember reading what all three of them wrote, and I was like, “Man. I have to say, they’re all way better than me.”

There was a time when that sort of realization would have depressed me, sending me spiraling into despair.

This time, I simply felt – gratitude, wonder, and humility.

Like, “Wow, I really didn’t realize who I’ve been getting to know all this time. When they write me, usually it’s just them reaching out at their low points – sharing all their pains, sorrows, fears, anxieties, worries, suffering. Endless requests for help, for guidance, often to the point where I’ve lost my mind and my cool, going, ‘I mean, do any of you actually practice what we teach here? Do you ever practice the movements, meditations, or applying the self-refinement techniques when these feelings come up?’”

I am, and was, well aware of my own hypocrisy in getting angry and losing my mind over all this; for me, more than anything, working in that job has been, by far, the most important help for my spiritual and personal growth.

Endlessly hearing and being the recipient of others’ unpleasant manifestations, and endlessly practicing forgiving them, letting it go, and not letting it get to me, instead trying to tap into deeper compassion and deeper love for them. This has been a real, if slow and painful, purification.

But my point is – when I read these women’s writing – these women who I’d chiefly come to see by way of their frailties and shortcomings, I got a glimpse of their spirits, the them beyond their suffering-selves.

What I saw was strength. Subtlety. Sensitivity. Intelligence. Mysticism. Wisdom. High and effortless artistic mastery. In a word, beauty.

Mm.

I don’t want to write anything more at the moment, actually, though I will; here I took a long pause. My mind stopped, and only silence seemed right.

In fact, I probably should stop there. But, for the sake of my own vanity, for my own record, I’ll add a couple more words, the words I began this to share.

One of these women, retired, now actively pursuing her poetry, traveling the world to read at conferences, being published, and all the rest of that, shared some of her latest writing with me, including an “American Sentence.”

She told me this was something Allen Ginsberg came up with – a novel poetic form, in loose imitation of the Japanese Haiku. Look it up, if you’re interested; I’m not interesting in expounding or explicating.

In a sense, this person I’m speaking about is on a very different wavelength than me, though we connect on a heart-level about many things.

She hasn’t seen and reflected on – dare I say, understood – some of the things I have, with respect to what’s going on not only in domestic and international politics, but even with things like the culture and pop-culture of the 20th century and beyond.

In a word, she believes a lot of the stories we’ve all been, and are being, told, and I’ve come to see that almost all of them are outright lies, falsehood, illusion, magic.

Ginsberg is just one little example of that – a stone in the mosaic, as I also wrote elsewhere recently, though in a rather different context.

He’s been sold to us as, what? A civil rights activist? Groundbreaking poet? Elevated soul? Guru?

I won’t go into it all. But let me tell you, baby, he ain’t that.

I won’t even speak the words, but let me say it this way.

I wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot clown pole.

He’s that floorboard you put a crowbar to, pry up, and – boy oh boy, what do we have here? Rot, mold, termites, roaches, and plenty of other things to make you gag and vomit.

And I’m telling you, you start gathering more and more stones, piecing together the mosaic, and the horror of the recognition of the face that takes shape when you start to see the big picture is enough to put the fear of God into you.

In a word, I’d say he exemplifies everything I’ve come to see is wrong, rotten, and empty with the “do your own thing,” “everything goes,” “seek your bliss” flavor of spirituality he and all his ilk have been selling us for at least the last 60 or 70 years.

They’ll tell you, unrestrained sexuality… psychedelic shamanism… absence of self-discipline on all levels, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual… an artistic expression that rejects tradition, form, formality and which rejects subjugation of the will to the tutelage of a master greater than oneself… they’ll tell you all these things are freedom.

And I’ll tell you – they’re not.

They’re prison. They’re poison. They’re death.

This friend, the poet, asked me if I’d been writing; I said I hadn’t – I’ve hardly had a spare moment.

She told me about the American Sentence and shared one of hers.

I said, “I’ll think about it and maybe will share one sometime.”

She gently coaxed me: “It can be about anything – whatever you look at from where you are, whatever you see.”

So, I paused. Sighed.

I looked out the window.

I looked at the explanation of the American Sentence.

I looked at the hagiography of this man, Ginsberg.

I looked at him, I looked at myself, and I reflected wordlessly on the many influences that have been coming into my inner life.

And I wrote back:

“Ginsberg howled, soiled bedsheets flapping on flagpole; saints scrub silent in cells.”

An American Sentence.

I would prefer a Saint’s Sentence: toil, patience, chastity, service, discipline, humility.

And I would not have it commuted, though I will ask for pardoning: I’m told the yoke is easy and the burden light, but I wonder about the strength of my legs and back, and don’t doubt I will stumble and fall many times as I struggle to bear it.

12 March 2025