a waking mind aware of being here nor there

(or, mental amusement before seeing the light of day)

I am older than the selves of life leap-frogging along the making of time and place.

I am before the restless generations of becoming and dying and becoming. Before the chaos, the watery womanly demos of unthinking flesh and bone generating the moon time. Before the history of fallings from the womb and returnings to its vaginal elections. Before the breeding laying beneath the seeing of me alone unpartnered, uncoupled from the frenzy of fucking before corpses of stone deadly silence.

No music without the drumming of knowing nothing, knowing everything in the dance. The eros of gorging, of nippled firming of magical wands, then seed spewing and lactation. Who understands the middle churning between the alpha and omega, the bearing of souls from wet wombs spasming the vibrating streaming of being in and out of touching the accordian stops and starts. The attuning done by ear, not seeing the measurement in darkness but in light.

What withstands the onslaught of viral memories of how to suck the energy out of nothing and be such being. Rosy redness sainted nick clauses of coded connection, spitting of flakes of blood frozen in falling from night sky of the womb, here and not here, there and not there. Which is it after all?

return to poetic stuff

The Inner Lives of Children

Krista Tippett’s interview of Robert Cole is a gem.

I’ve often found kids to be prophetic in their take on happenings in the lives we share with them. Their curious natures are attuned to the questioning and storytelling at the heart of the great spiritual traditions. Their courage to express what they see truthfully and justly, even when others may try to teach them it’s best to look at things conformingly, is the spiritual fount not only for religious exploration and the growth of philosophical awareness, but also for scientific exploration and the growth in knowledge of natural phenomena.

There is personal power to be gained and effectively shared when kids and the humblest of “kids” within adults appreciate the mystery of, if not the answers to, the biggest of questions we can ask. We adults are often embarrassed by and seek to avoid mysteries we can’t explain; kids celebrate mysteries as wonderful companions for their curiosity. Even more than we adults do, they understand the world best through stories, not logical explanations–stories that have meaningful happenings in them–that dramatically tell the loss, hope, and recovery they experience themselves or see others experience.

Despite misfortunes which may happen to them or those close to them, when their vitality and good humor are supported by us in caring for them, kids learn to lead their own lives in ways that allow them to emotionally connect with others that are more fateful to their success in being productive and happy than the material means conventionally assumed to be indispensable to it. We need to give much more attention to kids’ “spontaneity and particularity,” as Robert Cole counsels, and to listen responsively to the big questions they ask. These are key to engaging them in learning who to be and what to do and why.

metaphors for naturally occurring god-awareness

Neither the sketchy historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, nor the abstract theological construction of him which has buttressed the cultural supernaturalism of Western Christianity over its history despite its thousands of contentious parochialisms, is as potentially foundational for a twenty-first century spirituality worthy of meeting human needs as is the metaphor for a shift in (god-)consciousness presented by Deepak Chopra in his 2008 book titled The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore.

The “spirituality” that moves me personally (one of several “inspirited” mind states quite altered from everyday concerns) is rooted in natural evolutionary and personal developments in the histories of real, not other-worldly beings, and flowers in human propensities for awe of a wondrous ecology in which we are all interrelated and beautiful from the scale of galaxies to that of viruses. The awakening–the discovery by persons individually and in common–of a deeply personal and original awareness of connectedness and resonance between their inwardness/mindfulness/self-interest and the naturally nested physical and human cosmoses in which they exist is for me the “educational” foundation upon which a materially sustainable, culturally enjoyable, and commonly just global community of located communities of learners and collaborators is possible.

What intrigues me is how much today’s findings in various neurosciences and in social sciences, which are being re-formed by these findings, support longstanding traditions in authentic, essentially non-creedal, inherently human spiritual endeavoring.

I intend in time to add additional insightful writing and other media which have the remarkable property of merging a naturally human spiritedness which motivates exploratory and creative ventures into mysteries of being with the interdisciplinary sciences which attempt to understand that motivation in neurological/psychological and social/cultural terms of falsifiable evidence.

A sage insight from old India (i.e., “The measure of enlightenment is how comfortable you feel with your own contradictions.”) is even more applicable to living successfully with the complex and wonderful resources available to dynamically in-form/re-form each of us personally in our twenty-first century lifetimes.