Date of Birth

what will stay?

born fresh, a 

kite flies randy

all day long

in pure blue,

the deep woods

teem with life

while open waters

crave and flow,

new waves crash

and pull away.

Coffee with Kafka

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

~Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

I try to picture Franz, a mustache? A good Czech. Maybe I'll read that one.

The taste of the new Hawaiian Kona coffee is much more mild with milk then is the other double espresso. And not nearly as strong.

Great bands of clouds all day. Muggy. Stormy. But without rain in our front yard thus far. Just now I hear the high winds gusting.

I was telling the new person who is here now to care for me how I am reading a book about the art of wasting a day… [Paula Hofl ] It's a book about leisure, intentional savoring and enjoyment… Intentional care of the interior life… Some days I think to myself if I get any further into the inside of my interior I'm simply going to ooze out my ears and disappear.

Still I wonder. If there's no one watching the world happening than what is happening? The things we're doing? What about the rest of it? I long for a life beyond my lists.

I say "Franz! I've been looking at the world on purpose all of my life!" Very early on it started. You're going to have to wait – heard that about 500 times a day as a child and before you knew it I figured out how to do it and to enjoy it. It took until age 12 to find a neighbor kid as weird as I was and who could invite you into the fourth dimension of his third universe to captain a ship he created to modify another retrofitted version he had dreamt up six years earlier.

What if when people said, be patient for a minute, we said – Thank God! Back to life even for a moment simply as a being instead of an arrow pointed at something for the sake of something other than the pleasantness of being present to the present and what it brings when we finally cease our stirring.

I don't have less to do I have more to be thankful for because I try to notice because I love beauty and in its presence, especially outside in the great wild earthly lively, I feel completely alive – here's why and here's why and there's why and another example, and this one and that one… And such is the finest rhythm of any day that anyone could ever live – look… Slow down a minute and look… And listen and see there … it's at your feet.

BEING IN THE YARD

Chimes taught me

How to

Never sing the same

Song twice.

What We Come Up With

I mean, I have to wonder what it would do to simply have a seat in your very comfortable counseling office and sit down for a few minutes to speak to everyone about some things you think would be fairly helpful for everyone.

I suppose it could be interesting.

If you did, where would you start?

Well that's easy, I would start by telling them to allow the counselor within to attend to whatever is alive inside of them… Just to listen very quietly and gently…

To watch tenderly whatever imagery arises… As they breathe and settle in to their bodies.

Sadly, quite often folks will be working with enemy imagery, something someone said or did that stimulated discomfort.

I invite them to think back to a phrase or word that was said. Then back to the breathing… To feel it in the body and notice quietly whatever happens inside.

From there maybe I'd invite them to try to name some feelings. What might sensations in the body be pointing to emotionally, what feelings are present? Then we'd moved on to – thoughts that they notice our splashing to the surface – they could say "These are my thoughts – this is the movie that's playing inside my head" whenever they return to the trigger (what was said or done, what a cell phone could record.)

As they disentangle thoughts and feelings, I might invite them to pay attention to the real basic human desire or longing that seems to be charging or giving life to them. Behind or beneath all of the different strategies and ideas one might be coming up with to solve or fix the problem or the other person, what is it that YOU are really wanting at a soul level?

As soon as one is able to name that longing (not a specific strategy or specific proposal) they will begin enacting a reopening of themselves to bring that very value out into the world through free choosing. Quite often this new burst of energy ends up flourishing into some sort of creative contribution or a request of oneself to try to be and move and live in a new way because it's freedom for them, and fullness; much more than they had before.

I'm Listening to Kitaro

Lying face down in the grass
which is still wet with rain. It is
even more green up close. Weeds

have gone to seed all over so
there are birds everywhere nestled
around me. Feeding. Nourishing

While they dream. They took trees
down, one older than your great-grandfather, three houses past ours, on
this street of sorrows. Its enormous

Life is over. I smelled sawdust pasty
on the asphalt, fallen down into cool
brazen veins.

The damp still held the smoke, echoed
the daylong grinding down, the secret
burning edges. The teeth of steel.

Now again the storm relents, they
return to feast, to tweet, to turn me
to my back, my dreams one day

of becoming a tree.

GOOD FRIDAY

GOOD FRIDAY

April 19, 2019


by Randy Smit


Always look on the bright side of life.

- Monty Python's Flying Circus



Gray skies, raindrops. Perfect.


On a cross, of course, one can

Still never be found without options.

Haven't the Masters taught us, "Despite

Whatever is happening, we always have choice."

Without a wink we can think and feel and say and pray whatever

We want. To the liberated, death is a hiccup found between

Two unending sighs of freedom. Take that


To heart and

I'll bet you soon have a list of your own

To take to your next crucifixion. Sometimes

Over the noisy din of the pounding nails or

the God blessed scoffers in my ears,

[Insert mocking those mocking here] at

times like these, like so many other journeymen healers,

I'll ask my personal care attendant to quietly unfold

The wrinkled scrap paper on which I was lucky enough

To scratch down a list of these few beauts

for those most ferocious moments, the God

damned ones, the Oh, the hell on earth of it! ones…




Emigrate.



Never leave home.



Think of what's her name… no really,

Remember that one and that other one and that other one



Recall the bile! Again and again and Vomit straight into your enemies eyes and crush the skulls of their infants – AS SOME ONCE SUGGESTED – and

Scream your fool head off for someone, for Christ sake to take you down and stop the bleeding and cover you with a blanket!

[Insert tears here.]


Be the pain. Hold its hand. Kiss its cheeks.

Serve it up a velvety bourbon at a blues bar on a lonely Friday night… Yeah, with a cigarette.



Invite it back for the holiday to meet your folks. Make it a

casserole and be sure to share plenty with the starving schmucks on either side of you.



Savor the wisdom you had the day you finally decided to

skip driving out into the cold drizzle to find the perfect $10 card

at the Family bookstore.


Make the world your family. Eat

with them, help them to the restroom, watch their kids and play

without ceasing, grab them some groceries, tell your

own dear kin we can, yes we can – and that us against the world is

against the world and that's not us, not ever.


On the cross, at the worst

Dissolve into light and fluid and feathered and holy.


Notice the perfect.

Adore the gray skies,

Love all the raindrops.

IT'S POETRY MONTH

It's time to listen to the moss in the backyard beneath the maple tree without its leaves as yet but snow flurries just yesterday two days after 60s, go figure.

We have Sonny, my favorite Labrador nephew while my brother and his kids are down with mom and dad in Florida of course where it's warm and in the 80s. But seriously I hope they have fun.

It is time to see if Michigan State can make the final four and to finally try the instant pot we opened back at Christmas, no I am not kidding. I think we're trying porkchops first.

It is indeed time to get out paper and pencil and sketch new worlds with words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs of reason and folly and feverish intensity or grotesque, minuscule preoccupation or the inane, the ever vague and vacant monosyllabic

Whah? Huh?

Who? Wha?

Huh? Whah?

And then you go eat dinner and think "Yummy, and it's poetry month!"