So Long, 2012!

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5

Where we dream is to us a little more than seems feasible by our own imaginations, but less than any of the known worlds of our experience. It is a place that is not a place, a different river than life, and like being born into the waterway of waking hours, we enter not knowing from what source the dreaming flows, yanked out of it at morning bell with the smell of the water still lingering. The feeling that the river is shared by all who dream: our inklings whisper that the dreaming, too, is real — if not as sharp. They say that angels have spoken to the earthbound in dreams, perhaps to conjecture that the stairway to Heaven is to be found in the dreaming…. We all believe in some sense that the dreaming is just a weird echo of what is solid and alive. It may be that there is only one true difference between the dreaming and the living: never can it be said that the dreaming has heard us scream.

 ⁸And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

 ⁹And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

 ¹⁰And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

 ¹¹For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

 ¹²And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

 ¹³And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

 ¹⁴Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

If you don’t recognize it, this is Luke 2:8-14, what Linus says at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas. That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

4

Like all transcendent phenomena, you may examine destiny inside and out, dissect it and label all the minutia in a consistent, human logic — and it will still be a mystery. One understands that the concept of what is meant to be cannot be stitched on everything that happens to happen: the mystery only holds for some specific effects. Not even all inevitability can be classified as being of fate. Somewhere a winding chain of events cause greatness to occur, and we call it destiny when we sense of it the tragedy or the triumph outside of the ordinary movements of this turning world. When we sense the desire of the universe to master the eventualities, over and above the standard win or lose. Be warned: you cannot avoid the choice, and when you choose, everyone else will say how it was the inevitable way. But you know all too well when enough weight is bearing down on you: how easy it would be to drop it all, and run.

Max Ernst: Configuration No. 6

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3

What is love? We all at one time or another have thought we knew. But perhaps it is so simple a thing that we will none of us ever understand it. You may trace the outline of its paradoxes, like when we are most in love, the least we are able to express what it truly is, then realize that to think of it in such a manner — that of some intellectual conundrum — is to miss the point entirely. Perhaps to best know love is to know the fruits of love, as merely to say that love can move mountains is nothing compared to seeing that mountain actually moved…. But then, when we do this, it is then only to know love’s most outward appearance. Can we hope for better? Or can we say, at most, “Love is love,” and to shrug our shoulders — that we must all mean something close enough to each other’s ideas of it when we speak of it — is this all we can do? Or is it to say, “Love is love,” and have that to mean that anything we do with our heart in the right place — that is love? Or is it, finally, “Love is love,” why are you asking of what you already know, in a question that can never be answered — for what is love? The answer may be that the time would be better spent in moving those mountains.

2

The life cycle of a typical animal consists of birth and death, and in between, reproduction, eating and excreting. Perhaps there are certain other niceties along the way, but that is the basic contract for life. Everything else, in fact, is a sort of magic: that which holds us in some spell, which engages our interests and time, which changes our minds and changes the world in certain purposeful ways. We as human beings must appear like this to the “lower” animals: that we are magicians to be able to do as we do, magic indeed that allows us move heaven and earth beyond the accidents of wind and tide. These activities of ours may have nothing to do with the basic contract, yet usually, what is known as the meaning of life — what it is all worth — strangely, it is found only there. In the magic. And perhaps this is no accident, either.

1

The notion exists that there is good in the world, and that whatever may stand against that good, somehow, the good shall prevail. Some might call the existence of this notion evidence for the existence of God, or some greater, guiding force; while some others will pass this notion off as a childish wish fulfillment fantasy; but no one will deny that such a notion lives in the heart of human beings. If the human animal is born with any instinct at all, this appears to be primal among them, as if it was with us from the beginning, like the fruit we ate in Eden, of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — what it became when we digested it. It is an essential part of this human condition, what we call life, or even what we call a world: for in the darkest of hearts, an ember of this notion still glows. It speaks of hope in us all. The light in which we all wish to walk.

I, Poem

I am a poem writing itself,
ink spilling out of imagination.
Unfinished, some days I go hanging
upon half a phrase, sometimes
to go without meaning for a while.
I dream to be of epic things, teeming
with angels and devils and heroes,
but I do not know more than the words
that are written here. I think it must
be nice in the stories outside my
little window into being, but
I am satisfied merely to have begun,
and to know I have an ending
that gives me a reason to be.

If someone does not act when there is doubt, he will never act at all.

It is a fearful case to be an unsanctified professor, but much more to be an unsanctified preacher. Doth it not make you tremble when you open the Bible, lest you should read there the sentence of your own condemnation? When you pen your sermons, little do you think that you are drawing up indictments against your own souls! ... Oh what an aggravated misery is this, to perish in the midst of plenty, and to famish with the bread of life in our hands, while we offer it to others, and urge it on them!

Just because you can’t walk on water doesn’t mean you shouldn’t swim for it.

One who can forego pleasure to do what is right has got the key to every virtue.

Anyone who does not consider this day, this very moment, a priceless gift: he does not comprehend a right thing about the world.

There are no enemies, only tests.

One shall try to act within the simplicity of love. The pathless path.

We are the universe’s expression of the strange — we are merely so accustomed to ourselves we do not notice how the miracle flows through us.

We are guided by forces we do not understand, except that it is the hand of love that knows us.