griefbroth

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then light manifests as a mandala of all the living things; I did not know how beautiful we are!

Phusis

by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

1

A path through the woods winds along a stream that flows into the ocean.

I look up at new leaves on a branch overhead and follow it back through a thicket of laurels to a very old ash tree.

Another world of tree spirit interweaves our path, emerging through fluid energies likes sunlight.

Portals can be found near such a tree on our land and also in one's own interior.

Expand your inner space towards the subjectivity of native plants by envisioning shared land.

Earth encompasses physical nature and an ineffable vastness of intention, telluric impulse, vivacity.

You are part of that consciousness now; you relate to inner space as a direct perception of this consciousness.

For example, the ash tree is a perceptive organ for the consciousness of Earth, capturing and transmitting light frequencies.

The observer within, growth, Gaia, translates these frequencies into coherence, a matrix where every being connects to our sun, so the fractal, the whole, is more like a conduit.

Perception of the ash tree drops into my awareness as gnosis, species memory, prediction.

Then light manifests as a mandala of all the living things; I did not know how beautiful we are!

2 Now, growing turns the plant, let's say dandelion, out toward her surroundings, toward the other, light, with no return to her body from before. She becomes a physical expression of sun, rain, minerals around her, disclosing environment in the form of her being. Imagine a kind of discernment where thoughts circulate on plant surfaces, not in consciousness, and stay close to appearance. The telos of a stem is toward sunlight and its materialization in a yellow flower, in which beauty is how she communicates to us. This way of conjoining with her milieu, forming a rhizome with it, a passage, is a matter of aptness, adjustment and becoming in a dandelion. So, plants exemplify subjective being as constitutive relations with others. There's an intimate plasticity with place, which some call environment, but I call the beloved.

3 Many spring flowers draw their yellow from the sun. The sacred geometry of dandelion expresses a celestial space of multidimensions like possibilities. When you extend in alignment with their pattern, your future becomes myriad, where the fractal, the intention (like plant thought) is nonconscious, dispersed, immanent, embodied. Thousands across the grass describe a matrix of energy we call imaginal cells; between exhale and inhale, I receive downloads from this field of plenty where growth begins. Growing, the future in the present, occurs face-to-face with their environment. Everything connects through cause-and-effect or evolvement; then evolvement is a dispersion like feathery seeds into air, connecting time and place. So, I continue to dream forward; with each new seed, leaf, bract repeating along a stem, the futural dimension pushes ajar. There's a somatic openness to others, to rain, sunlight, a kind of responsibility. The plant's telos is contingent on this alterity, its sprouting, flourishing, flowering, dehiscence, withering away and so forth. Humans conversely approach death with hectic strategies for living longer, as if we are unfulfilled; higher than our last moment stands possibility.

4

When I first saw Richard's garden, I was surprised it was unkempt; weeds flourished beside roses and herbs with no apparent order. New intentions thrive in an overgrown garden; planning Eden in imagination connects intuition to the wild. So, if your intention is to learn from plant spirits, offer them beautiful questions; they'll show you change beyond what you imagine. You wake into universal consciousness alongside dandelions, nettles, red clover in their collective unconscious of flux and growth. This "tree of life" symbolizes our agreement to be here as consciousness streaming into an individual ash tree and its species oversoul, the green woman on our path at dusk. We become a channel for plants to bring the impulse of spirit into healing; then the way a wild rose overtakes his garden, the relation, is medicine. Who we are unfolds through this experience of her essential goodness. I exchange defense for tenderness, because plants give without reserve to every being. The rain I wish for, whether or not my prayer is acknowledged, begins to shapeshift my wish, and world is re-invented. The plant is no longer a simple object, mute and passive, but an enigmatic, fertile instance of the universal warp, wherein each prayer reflects his garden. May my prayer reflect with grace, the bestowal of love unearned.

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“Winter’s Whisper in Ochanomizu” - A serene Tokyo snowfall, 2018.

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HARLEM

by Michael Burkard

Two copies of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, write song instead. The way the woman has her hand up to the back of her head and what with me without my glasses her gloves look like they could be brief eyes. The man with her doesn’t want to write, I assume, but maybe he would read one of these if I walk up and in a non- worrisome way tell myself to be a lyric or a phrase or a brain and bring my hand up as in a dream ends do. Sea-light is my vacant lot among these evening buildings. Everyone to do. Love you are like a mile in the day-sky which has just shut down. Love I bring home one book to you from a blue car from somewhere.

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Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

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anne carson, red doc>

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Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity. The most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized.

The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum, monotony, which is atrocious.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

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a veri cjuute bookshop in Tokyo 

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@alltimeis-now let's talk about not writing for two hours, mate.

Fran Lebowitz on writing

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Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.

This FB post by Rebecca Solnit is the thing keeping me sane this morning,so I’m sharing it here in case it helps you all, too:

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward.

A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.

People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

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Stay Home

by Wendell Berry

I will wait here in the fields to see how well the rain brings on the grass. In the labor of the fields longer than a man’s life I am at home. Don’t come with me. You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods where the old trees move only with the wind and then with gravity. In the stillness of the trees I am at home. Don’t come with me. You stay home too.

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May Sarton, The House by the Sea

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Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea the water disappears into itself, hauling an ocean in.

Vortex, how you repeat a single gesture, come round to find only

yourself, a cup full of questions, perhaps some curl of wisdom, a bit of flung salt.

You hold an absence at your center, as if it were a life.

Grief - Richard Brostoff

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i need to write more