walking the diurnal purlieu
beyond the forest a field appears, but first you walk through a path that is framed on the sides by tall sumac red and there are green leaves in summer months that look tropical. you know you are somewhere special. one day I went too early on a winter morning and the nocturnal animals had not finished the night yet. a coyote crossed my path but he or she looked so tired like someone coming home from an all night party. I just paused. I noticed it went along a trail. I guess it figured to use what appeared and we both made our way. later, standing in that opening where the sumac lives - I saw it in the far distance look out briefly from a further path at the world. it alone. I alone. the snow fell silently and the sun was really making its ascent then. we were in another world but technically in this world. it went back in, disappearing into the tree world, like a part of a dream that yet wasn’t a dream, the birches and evergreens beyond. dispersing, travelling, going, being,…all in the greater morning mystery.
tenement, spirit, and pastoral worlds
I went far away, to a dangerous neighborhood, to the place where I was born and no birth time was recorded by anyone, so no natal chart could be drawn. and I went to a house where a lady asked if a rosary could be on the table as she talked and I said, ‘Of course, that’s good.’ the lady asked for my name and I gave it. she said, ‘I asked for your real name.’ I said I have a drivers license, a birth certificate, a passport, a health card, everything people have.’ she said that spirit is saying that is not your name. and then I said that is not my given name - and told her my first name, at birth. she told me many things, from the other world. things about people and what they were doing. and she talked about a figure she said was named strangely and she wrote out ‘Roomy,’ and later I contacted the world translator for Rumi and told him about it and he sent me a book of poems he had translated because there are good people in the world, some anyways. after, she said, ‘I am not a psychic, but a spirit medium, but I would like to be a psychic and am trying. can I try w/you?’ and I said yes, and she asked all these questions and each was wrong and we both had a laugh about it. and I went out from there and drove on a road a very long way that led me back to where I live. soon during that sojourn the industrial corridors and old houses started to fade away and more fields and trees began to appear. I saw barns wooden built on concrete forms and flaxen fields w/incredibly long gravel and dirt passageways that slept under the pure blue summer skies. these skies looked somehow succulent and if they could be eaten or breathed in maybe their goodness could become part of your soul. what a dense and difficult world I had exited and what a calm easy countryside I had entered.
(photo credit: Brian Michael Barbeito)
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