Let Her Have Them

[Continuing] 

The Honda was fun to be back in again, pretty reasonable with this new mechanic Anthony had put him in touch with. Sure it was a blast to drive the Subaru for a few days. High-speed and rustic and versatile. 

Now based on his lived experience, he understood how easily one could fall with one's eyes wide open into the delusion that what they are doing is suddenly legendary because it's happening in a four-wheel-drive, Subaru Forrester. People can put on knobby souls to further increase their purchase on the gritty world with its rugged roads.

He did some painting which felt delicious after all the talking and endlessly talking, Uber customers went on and on most days.

Then he got out the charcoal.

He had the thought that we are carbon-based beings. He would create from carbon as carbon.

He had purchased it at the art supply and it had been sitting there waiting to be used. Twelve 1/2 inch sticks of charcoal, each with a different degree of density. Some were so soft one couldn't help but crumble off a corner even to pick one up and get started. He would always save the little crumb of charcoal and throw it on the paper and crush it in severely with his thumb and rub it about and work from there.

Mist. The lofty atoms. Roiling cloud. 

Gray-light and shadow. 

Quieting dusk. 

He worked on one very large soft white paper which almost could feel like a lamb's ear beneath one's fingertips. It was one large cosmos of canvas filled with many and various spirited beings spoken straight to manufacture through various extended incantations. Settings for presence to manifest as a state of being and witnessing being in one.

Soft awakening, a pillowy shawl strewn out into threads swirling between the wet knuckled fingers of maple root and dead twigs at the shoreline.

A glint of light opens upon the hedges just beyond the dead stump, well dressed in a glistening set of diamond pearls, line and post in perfect symmetry, veiling the dead crooked face of the tree with what is strung as the thread of an ornately beaded webwork.

These were what he made with chalk and paper and his fingers.

Later on it would be grilled cheese. He would take the griddle pan and heat it up on the front burner with a bright flame surging beneath. He would take butter and toss it on the pan and smear it on one of the pieces of bread and then he would lay that bread down and hear the hot sizzle and see it bubbling at the edges. He would take American cheese, probably three slices and lay them on top of the bread and butter the other piece of bread thoroughly and lay it on top with the butter side up. He would watch it crackling and fizzing at the edges and he would enjoy the aroma filling the entire kitchen as the cheese started to melt at the edges. He would take his spatula and quickly slide it beneath the sandwich and give it a flip and then enjoy watching the instantaneous blur of bread and cheese and butter frying up nicely being tossed through the air right there before his eyes.

Moments later he would be on the couch drinking a Miller High Life and watching the Cubs and eating his grilled cheese sandwich that he had cut in half at the diagonal leaving room for ketchup between the two halves. He dipped each bite deeply into the ketchup and enjoyed an abundance thereof which paired so nicely with the cheese, basic Kraft singles. Tonight, indeed, it was three slices.

Zoe heard him belching and watched him go back into the doorway of the art room and lean against it admiring his enchanted world on and off throughout the evening. Art play was the way, he knew that for sure and toasted to Zoe and heard from the announcer in the other room that it was a double and it would score 2.

I'll call her tomorrow. Better than turning it into some kind of who's calling who first nonsense. 

Yup.

WORDS MISSING

[Continuing]

Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.

~Abraham Joshua Heschel

Of course, he would never be able to remember all of them exactly as they had been arranged. As he re-settled into his routines, the irritation remained. Sketch a man picking his thumbnails.

He had dialed her number twice on his cell phone while drinking French roast at Anthony's, while sitting comfortably at his station. Each time he hung up, flipping the phone closed and putting it back into his tweed sport coat.

It was that he had already allowed himself back up on the horse. He was already letting himself intend each fresh word for a new essay. The new dream had commenced and that meant much to him, very much. Would he call it: Praying into Practice? He wasn't sure, nor did he need to bother himself upfront, as to its title.

After the disappointment of his earlier essay being rejected by the Journal, this felt pristine. Actually if he wasn't one of those people who didn't generally talk a certain way, he would've told you that it felt anointed given how strangely the thoughts had shown up, the uncharted nature of their territory.

These were the missing words. These were the ones written on the pages of the spiral notebook that were now absent from its binding. Did Laura really have them? Would he ever ask?

*

By grace, every person's prayer essentially prays itself into being. It prays itself to life, pressing one's heart to open fully, ensuring also to procure the imaginations full willingness such that it can give itself, by faith, to the strongest extent possible, every power of illustration and movement. Each prayer seeks what it wishes to manifest and the wisest of mystics and sages suggest its fulfillment grants what all faith traditions have intoned from the beginning: We become what we long for.

A movie plays, we sense and see life in the light of God, producing soul-visions of the very life we desire in and with the divine, moment by moment, right before your eyes. We pray on earth all that is in heaven. We are revealers who are shown, we are seekers who know what we are after. Though the name is unbearably redactive, nevertheless it can, perhaps even must be named: Paradisaic Intentionality.

Perhaps some have in the past called it Kingdom Prayer. But who on earth anymore knows what a kingdom is or wants to, given what hierarchy itself has wrought throughout each of the bloodstrewn miseries of religious violence spanning human history?

It is what I call: Wonder Work… Edenic Walking; Willing our full selves forward prayerfully in an intentional manner. It is prayer-creating attendance to life and its flow from blessing to blessing, deep crying out to deep.  The endeavor places a blazing coal to the lips granting speech, giving power to words that can birth that one blessed sigh, the gaze of understanding, a tender touch of healing.

What it sees, becomes real, each thought an invitation to manifestation.

It can grant the smell of bacon or the sight of bright orange juice in a glass at the breakfast table. Through sorrow it sorrows, works any necessary pain or grief as clay. 

It is trained in the joy of birds and the turning of clouds.  It is play, it is deep breathing, it is connected time. Time for compassionate connection.  Moon-watching.  Glory-stepping.  Heart-listening.

Paradisaic intentionality happens by initiating and sustaining the conscious manifestation of communion, with Life and with all who are living… through love… in the present moment… by the spirit, thoroughly attending to whatever the liberated and trustful imagination, the healed and playful heart, might spill forth… 

It can be practiced and effective. It can be a chosen action of love and devotion. Who knows what it could do? God knows and we can make ourselves, through it, more wholly available to God and to others.

We would be trained for wonder.

*

Waiting for a red light, just about ready to drop off his final passenger for the evening, he still felt the fidget. 

There was a spattering of rain. Clouds hung low through the city. High-rises disappeared into mist at the darkening of evening.

It still felt strange to remember it as a once-happening event but also something that was still seeping out in terms of its purposes and meanings, with even some new specifics trickling in, now even well beyond the initial encounter.

As he was trying to explain to Zoe now back in the apartment, at first it did not feel like a speech or a definition or a lecture or an explanation… It was as though he sat within the sense of the prayer he would only later attempt to speak about.

There was what happened. There was the first writing down which occurred those few days after. Without the pages there was no toehold.

He wanted the words in front of him. They were not available, of course.

Later on he would try to find the notebook to see what material might've come after and whether or not it could grant any satisfaction for the time being. All he remembered was Laura's enthusiasm and the fun it was to explain this inexplicable prayer dream. Now it was feeling like more of a chore, like it meant something to get clear about, what was here to be learned or shared.

The Cubs were on against Cleveland and despite a few recent losses he didn't mind unwinding with a game. Two outs in the third with a runner on second. No score.  A blaring Cymbalta commercial.

He sipped his scotch. Someone out on the street was beeping for a friend to hurry up and get somewhere.

Zoe was wrapped up near his feet in front of the leather chair. You know they've lost three in a row, she said.

How about you stick with meow every now and then… You're going to jinx them.

SAVOR THE ROAD

 [Continuing]

I once read a story about a man who wrote a story that could be read forward or back and tell the very same thing.

… From the spiral-bound notebook

All the way home he listened to the Steve Miller band while driving between 80 and 90 mph in the Subaru. He drank a blonde, tall from Starbucks coffee, black with a Bacon and Gruyere egg puff which he ate like a muffin, two bights each along with a fairly moist chocolate chip scone.

He listened to Jet Airliner, setting the volume to 34 on the sound system which was rattling the seats and each of his ribs as he sang every word.

He felt relieved and open about how things were apparently unfolding for he and Laura now. What on earth?

And I just don't know… I just don't… turned over and over prayerfully as he began much work on complicating an otherwise perfectly simple and budding deep friendship.

The freeway, however, was wide open and he left the windows open wide. He turned words in his mind and on the road he drove the road on in his mind, where words turned over and over the freeway, and it was all nothing but breathing onward and in and out on the highway by way of grace that was travel and speed and utter freedom. He drove heaven in heaven, observing his bliss and renewing his soul on the highway in flight.

Give it a marble gigantic.

Give it a blue sky painted broader than sight.

People it with storys-high, brave detonations of cloud ascending.

Fly a jet plane through it. No really. Do it.

He pressed the pedal to the floor, fueled up on coffee with a gulp.

Big old jet airliner, Don't carry me too far away

Big old jet airliner, cause it's here that I got to stay

She simply must've torn them out and stuffed them away to keep them for herself. Why should it even bother me? I wrote the words, it's not as though those specific quotes are so long I don't carry them with me somehow automatically in my mind. She will have them. If I want them I know who to ask. It will be okay.

Zoe kept drinking her milk from her dish without even turning to acknowledge him.

He wasn't going to be the first one to call, that's for sure. He watered the plants and got groceries and checked back in with the newspaper and would run over the next evening to pick up the Honda from the shop and get things running again with Uber.

Home was nice. He shook his head a lot.

He missed her.

THIRSTY

 (Continuing)

The two of them carried on as carefree as children through the lazy summer day. They swam and laughed and mused, wondering about the strangeness of it all; the Poppy, its odd powers and all of the adventures it still seemed to be spinning out from its glistening epicenter, even into the present where the two were getting sunburned and beer-tired and made ready for an afternoon nap inside with the air conditioning on and the two of them sharing the couch.

Just before that, well under the influence of his third Old-Style beer, brewed in Milwaukee Wisconsin, as he started to repeat with every cold sip, he boldly announced that he was about to read the very best of the best from the spiral-bound notebook.

At least your humble about it, which is my favorite, she said.

Right? I should write about that.

There, overlooking the Kitteroo range which they still had not gotten anywhere near to hiking, not even into its foothills, they might have appeared to be two of the happiest people on earth.

A red tail hawk banking down to glimpse their folly would have seen mouths gaping wide with joy, would've heard laughter, witnessing two newly born into something fresh to the entirety of the creation, forming a kind of thing that was never a thing but more like a cloud on its bursting in, it's becoming without their efforts or plans and so well beyond their understanding.

Surely, the words were shared and to much beautiful and formative effect upon each of them. The reading proved they were not his at all. No sooner had they passed beyond his lips did he return to the same posture as earlier, that of the listener, a scribe in wonder, astonished.

Their visit would end, though there is more to tell. Naturally they would find their way into conversations about the framed photo and it's history and relationship to Laura, why she had sent it… Why this one? Why to him?

But for our purposes at present, we must simply remember to point out the horrible shock our dear friend did feel upon his return home when he found several pages of the spiral notebook missing.

The very finest words, those that made them sit still to stare at one another before going in for their much-needed beer nap. They were soon to disappear. The profound importance of securely reestablishing their whereabouts shortly after these encounters would come to test them greatly.

Like a strong hand threatening to crumble a tender blossom crudely in its palm, the future would enter to press against the green and fragile tendrils, what twirled so effortlessly toward life, abundant ripeness.

Perhaps Fred had some inclination, maybe that is why he whimpered and went on and on to bark as our friend rolled away after the visit in his immaculate Subaru Forrester.

FRED MESSAGES

(Continuing) 

Suddenly it all faded for a moment. And then I woke in a horrible sweat on the floor of the jungle on the island. I spit sand from my mouth and tried to orient. Was I hearing a voice? I'm not sure.

If the world is alive it's wind is life… (Something like that.)

I think that was the first message (his fingers made air quotes) communicated. Something was definitely being revealed to me.

It was so strange and powerful. There's just no way to explain.

Is it okay if I just narrate some of it like this and then read portions? Because most of whats here is chicken scratch, but as I'm piecing through it it's coming back to me like it was yesterday. So bear with me…

Of course! No worries, just keep going. I'm not changing the channel man, no way.

But, in that place I had the clear assurance that something was being revealed to me… I was being shown something of tremendous significance, something that at the moment I would not be able to understand, but that I needed to pay careful attention to in order to bring the full revelation to pass.

But what for? She asked.

That's just it, I don't know. He said. But every piece of it, every particle was irreducibly essential to the fulfillment, to the greatest impact and complete import of carrying forward a mission… Some sort of a World Healing Mission… Some big, radiant cosmic love… thing.

Really!? She said.

Absolutely! It was like if I didn't take notice of one tiny little piece of it the whole thing was going to flop and with grave consequences, certainly not just for myself but for everyone… It was like some global thing! My stomach is even tightening up right now.

No way… She said.

Then it would all turn a certain way and I was outside of it. It wasn't me, but about me.

For a time I just read myself like a story character that someone wrote about… But the longer I stayed in that place the more things I heard and tried desperately to write down… First in the Poppy dream… And then, after the fact, quite frantically in this little notebook… I wrote for most of the three days that followed after I awoke and … as I mentioned last night…Zoe is my witness.

Just then, Fred barked and jumped to his feet as though trying to alert the both of them. He ran off and splashed into the water. He kept it up for a time, repeatedly entreating them to follow him and do the same, with plenty of those wet dog shakes in between that only retrievers like he knew how to twist out perfectly in the summer sun.

After getting a few dips into the water on this hot afternoon they opened beers and ended up under a shade tree with him fumbling through some of the best pages, as far as he was concerned.

Check this one out, He said, all the while flicking his big toe over the second toe again and again, bouncing has crossed leg up and down as he read with great enthusiasm.

Speak the thoughts and say what they show… all you ever do is attend the flow and say what it is and where it goes and what your ears want to tell us and your nose discerns and what your fingertips touch and point to and where your curiosities and wanderings take us, wherever they may lead… Attend to the flow… Tell us what occurs to you… What seems to make no sense… Eat a sandwich or sit down to look at a tree. Tell and show… Go boy go, go, go

Holy Shit! You have to read that again!

I know right? Is that nuts… or what? It's a wild and out of control feeling even now sitting here looking at these words – what on earth!?

Many miles away Zoe woke from a nap with a premonition. She sat up straight and knew, straight through each of her claw-tips, that he was finally unpacking the momentous dreams. A radio played in the yard where she found herself.

The voice of Freddie Mercury bounced around the entire neighborhood, off of tin roofs and brick buildings.

I WANT TO BREAK FREE, I WANT TO BREAK FREE!

The shade beneath the oak tree at her special retreat was soothing to her Burmese spirit and body. Zoe purred well contented, reassured he was doing well.

ATTENDANT WANTED

 [Continuing]

Whatever we gratefully savor is ours forever.

~from the Spiral Notebook

After realizing how much the prednisone had been affecting him, his demeanor and enthusiasm, and also having seen how the recent encounter had gone off without any unnecessary embarrassments, he was reticent to dive back into lots of conversation. He thought to look for his shoes and get things headed outside like they had talked about the night before.

But you don't really want to hear about that now, my goodness you were up all night practically, how's your friend? How's his mom?

She shook her head and they both sat eating for a few moments. The birds outside were in full voice and he was particularly fond of the raspberry jam she had. He poured oversized spoonfuls of it onto his bagel not realizing he was starting to eat like a wild hyena. 

She finished a bite of toast.  Please no, not now.

She swallowed heavily and took a sip of her coffee.

It's not that it's heavy or difficult, it's just that I'm so, so ready for a change. The time I would spend telling you about it would feel wasted to me. And hey… when you started in about the dream, the vision last night, whatever you are calling it… I'll tell you again.  I was quite captivated.

She got up waving over to her left and plopped down in the living room, placing her cup on the end table and getting comfy in the corner of the couch as though getting ready for an easy morning of conversation as opposed to the early hike he was planning on. Thanks a lot.

He said, You don't really want to hear about that, it's just goofy, I mean really. It was a lovely gift, you were more than generous to send to me, he gestured to himself.  Actually, I'd love to hear more about your connection to this beautiful piece of work, I mean really. 

There I sat last night like some kind of idiot, talking about some leftover musings from my journal, who cares. It's boring. The more I think about it… It was probably food poisoning or something like that.

Ha ha! No way… It sounded like an adventure or some kind of epic tale or something. And I'll tell you I am much more interested and energized by that than trying to muster up the energy to figure out how to support someone I'm on the brink of cooling off with. 

He sat with a face that was straight. I have a straight face. I'm not smiling, I have no expression whatsoever, he said to himself.

She went on, It's just I haven't been able to tell him and it's like the worst timing.

His mother is going to be fine. She has these terrible attacks from time to time and I just wanted to be supportive.

And forgive me for sounding arrogant but some people still do need some help. Right? We can say that right? He's definitely one of these people who lives in his head mainly and so this has been the problem for me. He has not yet discovered the difference between his own thinking and the reality beyond his own head. 

Sorry your mother is sick man… But you're still coming off as a know it all – and a spiritual one at that!  

There is nothing beyond his own thinking. Like a lot of people, he has never looked at his own perspectives or perceptions as separate from what he would tell you is some universal absolute truth or real life or something.

He sat stoically. Just listening and trying not to oversell himself as a free therapist. Of course, he did know the type and resonated.

Well maybe you know some of these folks… Isn't it interesting after a while how all of those absolute truths that they are so sure of end up pairing nicely with the very life they're already quite comfortably living… And you'd better believe they'll be making sure you're going to live there with them too… Of course, as God intends.

It's just been a lot. She took another sip of coffee as though to bring the diatribe to a close.

At any rate, I'm begging you… Please, tell me more… Where's that notebook? Your spiral?

Really? He sat down on the other end of the couch and played with the strap at the back of his hat which he kept putting off and on as they discussed.

Really.

Over the next few minutes and after agreeing to go sit outside beside the water at the back of the property, he got out his notebook and the two of them sat talking in the sun on a checkered blanket.

So let me back up and give some context again. I sat on the floor. I opened the package and just started gazing at that beautiful poppy. I traced those perfect orbs of dewdrop on the verge of spilling from the tender petals edges. That's when I started to feel it.

The perfect scarlet blossom started working on me like some kind of magnet, like LSD or something.

It was as though I fell completely into my body… Like I was being drawn into the circular red petal more and more at its center… The further into the petal, the more embodied I felt. It was a sense of warming as though I were becoming one with the red which was swallowing me up into itself…

As he spoke he could not help but notice the stillness of her face, her lips.

Okay, so then… Tell me, do you remember going to your first carwash and staying in the vehicle? And all of the feathery strips of cloth spun around you on those ominous mechanical wheels… Like the car was being swallowed up by several of them on all sides… It was exactly like that but the touch of the spinning was softer than the fur of an animal… I was embraced and held securely but softly inside of its silken embrace… I was swimming in it… I was one with it and in it and it was around me and going through me like some kind of euphoric current… I felt giggly and ticklish… And more completely satisfied than I've ever felt in my life.

The better I felt, the more attention I paid to all that was happening. I tried to record it somehow – remember this, remember this – I kept saying to myself, but the spirit of it would be something like that of a kid discovering it was the first day of summer school. I wanted to savor everything. I wanted every last bit of the juice of its life. I found myself whispering – go with the flow, pay attention and flow…

And then like when you're flying and suddenly the airplane bursts out clear and open from a cloud bank and then suddenly the sparkling blue opens and you are above clouds and below other clouds… In that skyscape the sun shone brightly and took me by surprise as though searching me out till I could be found and held in its light…

Just then whatever I was flying gave a twist downward and banked me toward the right until I saw an island nearly of pure green and I was headed straight toward it.

At first it was only a spec of green among the great blue waters which were brimming and ruffled and whitecapped from my perspective. But the green then grew larger and more massive as I came into closer proximity.

Intuitively I knew it was the first place, the beginning.

AT THE TABLE

 [Continuing]

What is here is now is this. All being thought surely in the finest, most exquisite shameless, utterly pure and holy light of the creator who is present and speaking to you…

Here I am,

Creating flush about the flesh now on his face… Knowing in the sense of what it actually felt like to have your skin set to flame –

He saw too much, he thought too much!

He waved the coffee cup as though offering her some and also to keep his balance as his heart rate had spiked dramatically after the curchug and a hiccup, directly upon simply witnessing the mere site of her there on the chair facing him directly.

It was lightning, her visage in that posture, some electric jolt shot through straight into an otherwise bland and fictitious world.

Just then he bumped his knee into the table, it skidded a smidge, letting out one of those loud noises one might hear from a semi's exhaust out on the freeway. Bbrrrrr…!

My G… od! Anthony was right! I've turned into a primate in heat!

He shot a purposeful glance outside. Nobody's panting, I am breathing normally. In. Out.

I'm going to look outside, I'm going to point right now. I'm going to point my finger out the window at the geese. I know there are no geese.

Do you ever get geese around here?

Of course, he was up all night after completing his full round of Prednisone, he was sleepless and endlessly thirsty and concerned how it would go for her at the hospital and now, in this instant, as the early light of morning glinted off of the lake behind the cabin, this glimpse of Eve; the familiar someone shown pure after a manner more than innocent – he just wasn't quite ready.

What in heaven! What on earth!

His face had erupted into a terrible perfection of flush, so real that his face burst out its blood vessels all-around his cheeks.

He thought of hopping down the two stairs into the living room and out through the sliding glass doors. A quick change of scenery would deflect.

Yes, outside man! For God's sake get outside!

But luckily, by some small miracle of grace, much of it was lost on her. Suddenly the wild scene shifted and was over.

Such became clear as he watched her lazily reach over to start spooning out eggs onto her plate and diving right in to say something to him as though picking up their conversation without a speck of interruption from the night before.

So – You and I my friend were sitting down to talk further about this epic dream you had, remember? She buttered toast and took a crunchy bite.

I have to tell you. Some of my recollections from what you read to me last evening, I mean some of the poetry… the visions you detailed so elegantly… I couldn't shake them from my mind. 

Sipping his coffee, still in disbelief that such an out-of-control moment had so effortlessly and instantly slipped away like birdsong, as quickly and as naturally as it had erupted, he took a moment to simply shake his head and smile.

Sensing now that things would move along without her noticing, he thought to himself, I guess a little more connected with her than I assumed.

They are beautiful man, truly beautiful. Mostly I guess I'm recalling from what you read, that sense of vastness, the sprawling fields, the open skies… It's as though you traveled to another hemisphere. As though you fell into a sort of Alice's Wonderland.

Well… I guess I'd just say for starters. It was the photo. That perfect Poppy. Believe me I had no idea what I was in for when I tore open the package and began gazing at it there on my living room floor.