Archive | Introduction

I had been struggling with the newer hearing aids for over two years.  And the audiologists kept saying they are the state of the art but my ears were itching and my brain hurt.  It was irritated, my brain was.   With the new hearing test, the audiologist said you work very hard at hearing, don’t you?  I could have wept with no reserve, I was so relieved someone noticed.

There was more loss in hearing, but he said I can do nothing for your brain.  It is not registering always the switch necessary for human voices.  And because I focus so deeply on thought to shut out head noises, it is tiring and aging does not have much energy in reserve.

So to engage in conversation with more than one person is very hard work.  It is not because I am not paying attention.  And  when you call and I give someone the phone to talk to you, it is because I do not hear.  Not that I don’t want to talk.

I am grateful for the people in my life who help me.  Especially family.  They allow me space to work my work as long as I draw breath.  I hope I am worth my keep.

I Don’t Know How To Be Deaf. . . 

I am among you whom I love,
and try to understand your words.
I read your gestures, your body language
and your eyes telling me again
what you wish me to know.

I am desperate to understand.
Your impatience runs through your body
and into mine.  Shackled am I
with emotions as mine tumble
with yours and consume me.

We have shared our histories
through decades but now you run ahead of me
and I take my silent world and retreat.
I piece your words, the ones I hear
with a history I secured in mind.

What I have learned to read
by eyes that speak, are words that run
like rivers into each other to form
a crash against walls I hope I did not build.

Aged now, rubbed raw, there is nothing left
to flex against, to tell me how to assuage the deficit.
There is little energy at the end of Now
to make it work. . . no lessons offered
along the way but to be left dumb. . . .

I just don’t know  how to be deaf.

As  a good friend kept telling me,  circumstances alter things.  And as birthdays gather behind one, one seeks the comfort places.  And at the keyboard with the mind in long conversations with compatriots, companions, in conference and in prayer, it is a comfortable place for me.

I asked Jon Katz of BedlamFarm.com to recommend a book on Kabbalah since he quoted the religion often.  What I did not remember ever reading and did not know was that Kabbalah was the religion or practice long before the conforming Jews were praying.

It was a form where what we call Sages were gathering and chasing down their thoughts and giving gratitude for life.  One sees the connection in the first chapter of Genesis.  Upon their death they were able then to enter what was home.

The Sages when they died would be thought to be as in the next room.  They were as close as thinking could be and were visited.  Part of the Sages’ knowledge was that they could be visited in graves and could be spoken to and they would answer.

And I too, now sit and converse and religions call it praying as easily as I do right now.  The Divine Within is the I Am of the each.  We are in conference.

The Road to Damascus. . .

And Paul,
on the road to Damascus, unaware
of forces pulling at his thought,
was none the less surprised.

In the privacy of mind, how could
an invasion of thought not his own
be in conference?
So it is,  in the wars of the visible

and invisible worlds, the
supremacy for power does not stop.
Our worlds!  Claim the gods. . .
My world!  Claims the pilgrim. . .

One in partnership till man
tasted the lust for power.
Lest we lose this,
the best of all classrooms,

brotherhood is still the dream
and our hearts still too unripe
to embrace its benevolence.
But its power of magnetism

still attracts
what prompted this dream,
that catapults us
to give search to the meaning

to the why of us. . . .

When given and we are present in heart and mind, it is a rare gift.  I call it a Camelot Moment because it was perfect in itself and yet a confirmation to a philosophy in process.  It met with great appreciation when first published and now approaching Valentine’s Day,  for new readers, I wish you a Camelot Moment.

Camelot Moment. . .

The words we chose to speak
could not be construed to be words
of great love, but they were.
It was with gaiety that we chatted
about the commonplace and laughed a lot.
We were happy.

I sat in my chair at the dining room table
and watched with joy a moment rare in our shared history.
My coffee cup had been refilled so many times.
Its taste was cutting sweet.

You had risen from the table and in the space
that was the middle of the kitchen,
were moved by some unnamed force to do a jig.

In the fragmented second it took to blink away
a laughing tear, your form transformed and
there we were and yet not.

With feet doing your ancestral dance in mid-air,
your solid body was no longer solid.
A maze of dancing atoms and molecules took your shape.
Your color took on their transparency
and I thought how fragile you are!

It was just a moment but eternity practicing and
you were back into the time frame
we both knew as you.  I could not tell you what I saw.
The rules of this let’s pretend world are hard to break.

I sit at this desk with magically moving molecules,
drinking coffee from a supposedly solid white cup and saucer
and holding tight to a yellow pencil at a time
when the rest of the world sleeps and weeps.

Knowing the mountain is only a thought form
and with a little faith in my ability to move it, I could.
With our prejudices we mightily construct a world
to please or not, as our self image directs.

But in this brief Camelot moment,
I know that in that sacred space
I saw you so utterly defenseless,

I never loved you more, nor me.