Dramatic death scenes fill my eyes and nose with flashing reds and yellows.  Leaves throw their hands over their foreheads and float to the fainting couch of the soft wet earth.  Tears of rain fall slowly from the bare branches above.

Shift happens.  It is a drama play.

Bright laughing flying colors dancing on the wind.  Screams and cheers of soccer games floating throughout the neighborhood.  Jack-o-lantern faces growl and howl on stage from front porches with waifting white handmade ghosts floating near by.

Another shift and we smile and giggle in humor.

Welcome to human life Spirit Sweet.

My Dear is so close that when I turn quickly
I bump into Her nose
We squeal and stumble in the hallways.

She whispers funny jokes to me on the trolley,
Wondering if dogs have fantasy parlors or
If we could use the Space Needle for a bumbershoot.

We hug so close that sometimes I am distracted
By the illusion of life I see over Her shoulder.

Burying my head into Her neck made of dawn
I give her a rousing rhinocerous burbling kiss.

What would it like to be truly present at every moment?  They say that eternity is in the very moment of “now.”  So would it like being in spirit completely?  Could someone handle destitution, hunger, heartache, inertia, pain or imprisonment with the same bliss of deep meditation?  It seems to be a good metaphysical theory if we are truly human and spirit combined.

But the human part of me is extremely skeptical.  Sure, yeah, I’m FINE.  And we all know what that stands for (Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional).  As a human merely being, I am continuously stuck on a rollercoaster moving.  Perhaps moving in spiraling, dizzying circles, but focused on the next turn and remembering my experience on the last turn.  It is a challenge to enter each turn with that beginner’s mind.

Maybe in this very moment, if I set aside past and future, I can deeply feel the motionless river in my heart of my True Love.  It keeps me coming back here.  Now.

The goddess of green things lives here.  Yet Neptune has this day in a standstill hold with white mist throughout the field and forest.  The spirit must lead and my eyes to trust the crunch of the gravel on the path.  My ears now hear more deeply the sweet songs of small birds.  I settle in to savor the sounds of nature often eclipsed by sight.

I yield to all that I think I know to the gnosis of silence and mist.

Every day in every way I’m getting better and better and better.  That’s my chant today.  Loving this dizziness away.  Honoring the dysfunction with respect and listening.  Recognizing what I can do as I do nothing slowly.  Deeper and deeper surrender.

Bright leaves for the centerpiece.  Finished with their cycle of green and color, falling back into the dry crackling melting honor of earth’s embrace.

Perhaps my purpose is to realize I don’t need a purpose.  That world-changing people are just following their noses on the next indicated passion in front of them.  I entreat the power of humility and the grace of the ever present Friend that cleaning up emails, washing, puzzling, crotcheting and watching my favorite football team win can fill me up and overflowing with an endlessly good day.

I am better and better every day falling more in love with myself–merely a hint to the honoring holding closest hug of the Dear One.

Slate slabs from the Catskills as sidewalks, dipping and tipping with the century-old maple tree roots nudging up.  Cats patrolling the rows of long-porched narrow-windowed homes, tall and snuggled against each other from the hint of the cold season.  Asters clinging to the Indian summer, vying with bright flying Halloween flags and snarling pumpins.

Birds that sound like kittens.  The intoxicating smell of rotting leaves.  I breathe it in, filling my lungs and getting drunk on memories of homes long ago gone and love that melts when the ghosts turn sideways and disappear down the empty wet street.

Time is not real.  It is only how I feel.  Wrestling with the hysterical human game pieces.  Choosing my stories, perhaps not wisely, but with honey mead love.

Yesterday I felt like I was walking a tightrope–unsteady on my feet, wobbling, holding onto the walls to keep me from falling.  Literally.  Vertigo from what I sense today could be sinus blockage.  As always, I ask my body—what are you trying to say to me?

I’m dizzy from recognizing that I can’t figure it out, I’m not responsible for it perhaps but certainly responsible to it.  Returning from a continent-wide trip for a happy family event, I am teeter-tottering between the past, death, sadness, resignation, claiming decisions, and being half spirit, half human.

The human part of me wants to rectify being here and now vs. there and then.  Crazy thoughts like: I should live back there where I’m from, plant flowers on my mother’s grave, be with her relatives, deepen relationships with siblings and cousins–some who remember the past better than me.

The spirit part of me giggles, actually, at the rigid linear flailings of my aging body.  The Divine in me reminds me that my chess pieces in this game board of life is time and space.  I cannot go back and revisit that time with my mother that my cousin remembers so differently.  I cannot live in two places at once.  My path is my path and here I am always safe on this path.

Today I ask guilt, shame, regret, self-judgment and fear to step aside.  One tentative step at a time I walk through my house, my day, my path letting dizziness return my heart to the arms of the Beloved.  In Her spirit, eternity is my only limit.

The word “codependent” drives me crazy.  Probably because my mind constantly wrestles with old beliefs and feelings where my actions clearly are tangental to behaviors outside my control.  There is an old Tibetan master, Atisa, who says we are “controlled by others by compassion.”

In modern language, I’m assuming that means when behavior of the “other” (partner, lover, boss, grocery clerk, insurance agent, unemployment website, phone answering recording cutoff voice, ad infinitum) is supremely irritating, we are thus called (controlled) to move to compassion.

It seems like a hysterically impossible idea.  No matter what–disaster, despair, death, addiction, long days of driving and flying, deteriorating bodies, alienated family–we are to have a trigger inside of us that automatically flow with compassion, flexibility and warmth.

Today, I practice that warmth to myself.  Recognizing that in all these paths, horizon goals, inertia dead-end mazes, my Lady, my Lord, the Tao, bird calls, and cedar Tree stillness is Present here and now.

Are you ready for love?  Probably never, though we should have kid gloves in hand, basket of rose petals near by and massage lotion at our fingertips–ready to make love to the world at a moment’s notice.

I am flying for miles and hours above the earth today.  Here now defying time and space.  There then watching the astounding vision of farming squares, snaked rivers, cragged snow and rock mountains and miniscule roads weaving through ant-like towns. 

Endless landscapes of some loving Creator, a Divine Artist, or many Crafts Spirits working through the human hands, designing clouds, planning earthquake popping ranges of rock, lining the valleys with glistening rivers running circles around my mind.

Maps of me, these tiny lines on the screen.  Little flowers of gratitude that She kisses me ready for Her love.

Going on a trip back home reminds me of doing acid.  LSD was an amazing mind-folding event for me.  It showed me, as the saying goes, the many different doors of perception hidden beneath the so-called day-to-day reality.  I was lucky that I had adventurous trips with careful friends in safe environments. 

Today I am driving through lands of my childhood.  Here is where I grew up, became an oldest sister, traipsed through school, first took off on my own for summers, learned about young love and wrestled with independent finances.  Summers with guitar-playing boyfriends, hitchhiking on dark winding roads, reverberating through eye-opening friendships beyond my parochial imagination.  Waitressing and lying, partying and working without sleep, sustaining on peanut butter and sugar sandwiches and grapefruit Tang–those were the days.

I soak in the brilliant shocking colors of autumn sugar maples and aspens that cover the old rolling hills.  I breathe the sweet fragrance of melting leaves and chilly wind.  I bow to the resting place of my mother beneath towering lodge pole pines.  I gather the wood roses on her grave, and walk in the Divine Peace of Her indulgence.

My heart folds as a mobius strip, weeping and smiling with love and aches.