Call You Home

The call is felt in the blood. A tidal surge in the veins that ghosts the heart with gravity. When least expected, the surge will lift the feet off the floor and leave the urge to be out the door. On the road to the water in all its nervous-making grandeur. The heart fears the swell, and needs it to survive. Dreams tell it so.

A maritime song perhaps first heard in the womb. Blood rushing, swirling through the cataract of the umbilical to percuss the nascent tympani of a budding creature. A glorious song shared between the mother and the child. It would be the child’s first experience of the rhythm of the tides as expressed in heartbeats and phases of the moon. It would be fifteen years or more until a day came when the youth stood on the shore, dumbfounded, without understanding why the sight and sound of the waves was bracingly new and shockingly ancient. He felt it without comprehension of the reasons.

It could be that this illumination was the young man’s first real glimpse at the Mystery of life. There could be no forgetting of that energy and electrification in this first experience of synchronization between the heart, blood, and consciousness. The youth could not know then just how similar the feeling would be when, years later, he made love for the first time. The congruency would be sweet and shocking.

But that was in the future. The shore was the Now. Of course, the Future is the Now at some point. This realization came home to roost years later, experiencing the same sensations in different circumstances. It reminded the man of comedian Brother Dave Gardner, heard decades ago on a vinyl record, who quipped that you can’t do the same thing again but “You can do something similar!” Brother Dave was referring to people who had a good time at gatherings, but the sentiment applied still. A beatnik comic channeling the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, as interpreted by a young man who woke up in middle age.

Today that man stood with his toes in the surf and fingertips wet from the sea. The taste of that water lay lightly on his tongue. It was the taste of something similar, a different river, but realized anew in the heart. It tasted like home.

Be Proud You're A Rebel?

This is a bit of a long one, but it could not wait. It contains some words that are hurtful demanded by context. I submitted a version of this in December 2016, in response to "We Are Bitter, No. 2: From 2016 Forward," an essay (linked here) by Chuck Reece, editor-in-chief of The Bitter Southerner. The Bitter Southerner is a fine online magazine about the South and things Southern, in its myths, its realities, and its futures. I did not hear back from The BS (as it is affectionately referred to), but with the horrible events that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia over August 11th and 12th, I felt compelled to give it another turn in the light. It has been edited to take into account those recent events.

I was born and raised in southeastern Virginia, Portsmouth to be exact. I went to college at Virginia Tech, up in the Blue Ridge mountains in Blacksburg. Upon graduation, I wound up in Baltimore, Maryland where I stayed for over twenty years to find myself with an ex-wife, a daughter I adore, and probably nowhere to go from there. This before life got really crazy and I ended up in love again and in Kansas, where I lived until July 2017. Things did not work out in the heartland, and I moved myself back to Maryland, this time to the city of Annapolis.

To talk about a new South, a new America, we have to discuss the ugly, nasty truths of the past. The last election cycle in particular made everyone –hopefully, everyone—look inward to reexamine their consciences and outward to reexamine the cultural matrix to which they are beholden. I know I did.

To my shame, racism and bigotry were part of my upbringing. It never reached the magnitude of joining the KKK or actively seeking out the “others” for abuse and belittlement, but it was there. It was casually woven into the fabric of our daily lives. We, including myself, had no qualms about telling ‘nigger’ jokes or using it to say “those niggers” in the same way that more enlightened people would say “those folks.” You would hear stuff like that among white peers at the same time you wouldn’t actually say it to someone’s brown face.

The same shameful treatment was applied to Hispanics, Middle Easterners, Asians, the disabled, and LGBTQ folks. Equal opportunity bigotry, no doubt. I often felt uncomfortable spewing such things, but it never bothered me enough to stop myself or call out others when they did. I let myself be misled because I did not think to question it.

That is until the day I had a jarring break with the culture in which I was embedded. My awakening to what was really going on around me. An occurrence I will never forget happened in front of me as I walked into a shopping mall in my hometown. Ahead of me were two white men, appearing to be in their 20’s. Bearded and clad in a fairly typical set of work clothes that almost could have been our city’s uniform, they reached the door just as a little African-American girl was coming out.

She was probably no more than about four or five years old, carrying a toy and pushing on the door while her mother followed behind. The girl paused in the doorway which momentarily blocked traffic. Just as I came up behind the two men, I heard one of them snarl at the girl “Get outta the way, you little nigger!”

Thunderstruck is too mild to describe what I felt. I stopped while the two men pushed rudely past the girl and into the mall. To her credit, the girl did not seem to notice the slur hurled at her. But I am sure her mother heard it, because she hustled the child out the door much faster than you would expect for something so casual as a shopping trip. A few steps into the building, I had to stop a moment to collect myself.

I felt sick. A churning stomach and a racing heart catalyzed by the brush with violence and hate I witnessed. I had no understanding. How could that be? The girl was being a child, no bother to anyone, and yet these men saw fit to verbally abuse her because of her skin color? The illogic and injustice of it made my head spin. It sank in that this was how a lot of society, my society, operated, hurting others with thoughtless cruelty because they could get away with it, backed up as it was with structural and institutional racism.

The first of many switches flipped that night. I went home uneasy and sad while trying to make sense of the loathsome behavior I witnessed. It sparked the first of many years (in my teens then, in my 50’s now) of introspection and inquiry into the causes of such bad behavior and how to eliminate it in myself. I started turning a skeptical eye towards society. Intellectual laziness and lack of awareness had led me down a slippery, dead-end path. I began to question things, starting off with how I had allowed others to do my thinking for me.

I felt ashamed of the Southern way of life in which I lived. The people around me began to sound backwards. My own voice started to trouble me because I realized I did have a drawl, even if it wasn’t as deeply twangy as some of my friends and relatives. Arriving at college, I actively sought to drop the accent and even leave behind certain figures of speech. I was around a lot of different people in that time, and was self-conscious about being considered too “Southern.”

I succeeded, to a degree. In my early years out of school, working for what ended up being about 20 years in Maryland, many of my co-workers seemed mildly surprised to find out I was from Virginia, because I did not sound particularly Southern. I even lost my taste for sweet tea, if you can imagine that! The net result was that slowly over time my roots loosened their grip on the soil from which they sprang. I became untethered from the past in such a way that I cast off the prejudices I despised but forgot to hold on to some of the good things I loved.

As the years unfolded I thought more and more of myself as American, but without regional identity. I was haunted by the notion that I was missing something that I could not put my finger on. I cannot tell you exactly when my search began to find what I lacked. But I can tell you my primary research medium was food. I have always been a trencherman, and learning about myself through cooking and eating foods from my birth region was a natural fit even if I was not fully cognizant of why I wished to do so.

Smithfield ham. Cornbread and grits. Fried chicken and collard greens. Some things I loved to eat and some things I thought I could happily do without now became more important than ever. Mail-order sorghum even made an appearance or two in my house. An old cast-iron skillet of my maternal grandmother’s fell into my hands as an inheritance when she passed away. It took me years to understand the great gift that skillet was, one that I still hope to live up to when I cook.

The point is that each dab of sorghum and butter on a biscuit, each skillet of cornbread, each forkful of collard greens I washed down with my (unsweet) tea began to fill me up in ways beyond the mere existence of calories in the belly. It all filled me up with home. The sense of dislocation I dragged around for years slipped away and the roots began to push themselves back into the dirt of my creation. There was an eagerness to share with others the Southern boy that I was and am. My adventures in cooking also taught me history as a spectrum, and food as a bridge to others.

This eagerness and comfort grew in the years between my divorce, subsequent relocation to the Midwest, and the travesty of the 2016 election year. My sense of well-being took a big hit as I watched the ugliness spewing out of the mouths of our President-elect and his repugnant followers. Who could pay attention to the news cycle and not be shocked and upset by the flood of bigotry bearing down on us as a nation?

Memories started creeping back in. Flashbacks to the times as a teenager when I paraded a Confederate flag around the neighborhood because I thought it was cool. Embarrassment at having participated in Civil War reenactments, on the side of the South of course, because I wanted to be a rebel. Shame welled up when I recalled telling and laughing at ‘spear chucker’ jokes, thoroughly thoughtless and disrespectful of the African-Americans I personally knew and liked at school. Waves of regret when I remembered that little girl at the mall and how I lacked courage to stand up to racist bullies and call them out on their vileness.

I was young, once, and stupid.

So it was when the election results were announced that I felt horrible for Americans in general and Southerners in particular. All this time having gone by, the history under our collective belts, and we have learned not enough to elect such a terrible representative of the American ideal? 

Watching the news about racists and neo-Nazis marching Charlottesville stirred up the muck again. The horrific act of murder we witnessed in that car plowing into a group of marchers who had taken upon themselves the hard work of opposing hatred, bigotry, and evil. A young woman who stood up for many good things killed by a man who took hatred and spite to obscene levels: this is the malignant fruit falling from trees planted long ago. 

Hearing the president generically condemn the violence, with the morally bankrupt stance of "many sides" being at fault, it hit me hard that we could have done so much better. We have to do better, be better . For the sake of all of us, we are going to have to oppose the white nationalist agenda of hatred, discrimination, and violence. 

In the South, whether you live there or carry it in your heart (as I do) and in America in general, we have to learn to talk about Confederate flags without waving them or using them as tools of fear and oppression. We have to stop fetishizing statues of deeply flawed, sometimes evil people. We have to understand we can move into the future without necessarily burying our past, but that future means inviting everyone to the table and being honest in our conversations with our fellow Americans. Claiming  superiority because of skin color and heritage is a desperately weak gambit to demand participation in the ideal of America. It only shines a bitter light on the institutional racism built into our society.

Difficult work is needed to determine who we want to be as Americans moving into the future. The arc of history is pretty clear on that score. We carry the moral imperative to resist hatred and bigotry wherever we encounter it. I learned that lesson long ago, acknowledging my personal shame in these matters and opening my mind and heart to cast out the hate I had thoughtlessly absorbed. After Charlottesville, it is clear that many white Americans have not done the same. We cannot avert our eyes, stifle our voices, shut our ears. We have bridges to build, not burn, if we claim to be Americans.

Magpie Tales 265: Miracle

Image via Magpie Tales

Our mystery came clear

upon Earth's awakening

rousing from young slumber

changing, molting, shedding skin

My golden height

Her fecund depth

Bind us to our miracle

The Garden of Regret and Promise (Sunday Meditation #31)

The plane leaps skyward, metallic Pegasus galloping into the midnight blue. The mind's eye rolls movies of trees uprooted, ripped from the sod with the sound of torn silk. The earth gives ground grudgingly. Woody fibers snap and ping as the strings of my heart break one by one. My old roots ran not as deep as I thought, my new roots scarce have entered the earth. 

The plane vibrates while I weep silently into my fist. Granular tears do not reach my eyes. I'll not give my fellow travelers a show, or reasons to conjecture on my state of mind. 

Viscid heartbeat in my ears above the hiss of air in the cabin. My hydroponic soul feels elation and regret in equal measure. I am weightless in the nutrient broth of the present, dreaming of love like rich loam, dark and fertile. Loam I leave behind and loam I race toward. What will spring from these fields I have cleared? This is unknown to me. My heart has hopes and fears for them both, and mastery over neither. 

The sky is black outside the windows. The ground below I cannot discern. It is the heavens in reverse, stellar velvet strewn with tiny yellow diamonds. My roots slip further from the humus embrace of fields I tend. I pray, as the poet Virgil implored farmers to do, that my summers will be wet and my winters clear. I till the soil patiently, waiting for roots to grow and with them, love.

---
From field notes written in transit, April 7th, 2013.

Discovering Light in the Flint Hills, with Ghosts (Sunday Meditation #29)

"What do you know of love?" whispered the voice in my head, ricocheting off the warp and weft of my mind to burst forth through my eyes and shatter on the back of my sunglasses. I was turning off the road, much to my relief. The arched gate of the cemetery beckoned, the orangey-tan dirt track leading me on. Beyond lay a sparse grove of monuments, blushed with moss and gleaming dull white in the soft sunlight of a Kansas spring. In a final burst of crunching gravel the car rolled to a stop. I briefly leaned my head on the steering wheel. I answered to no one present.

"I don't know."

I opened the door. The cool air of the Flint Hills rolled in to caress my face with feathery hands smelling faintly of stone, sod and ghosts. It was quiet out there, broken only by the subtle hissing of wind through the grass and a whirr of sparse traffic along the distant road. I stood up while taking a deep breath. My hand gripped the door frame. Thinking of love, or of what I did not know of it, made me dizzy.

Love slipped away from me again, a salmon evading the paws of a starving bear haunch deep in the stream. I thought I knew love but somewhere on this short road trip it came to me that it may be impossible to truly know something so much bigger than myself. So much more mysterious, arcane. Why this happened to me in broad daylight I cannot tell you. Perhaps the birds calling from the nearby trees knew the answer.

I asked them, nicely, and not too loud so as to avoid seeming rude. There was a burst of musical chatter, but nothing I could decipher. They gave me no counsel. The sun had moved a degree of arc, reminding of why I stopped here in the first place. I pulled my camera gear from the car and set off into the cemetery.

(It took little time to find a vantage point worth considering. There was a serendipitous line of sight threading through a cross, more markers, the cemetery gate, up a hill across the road and ending in a silo. I was surprised and delighted.)

The memorials were a curious mix from antique to new. Pillars, crosses, and slabs of marble and granite. In their own way all testaments to love. At least, I hoped it was love. I was seized by the notion that it would be tragic to carve all that stone for the sake of appearances.

I wondered, then, who would love me when I was gone. Who would care enough to erect a stele, provide a plaque and urn in honor of my memory. Staring past the large marble cross up to the silo on the far hill, a wan smile crept over my face. It did not quite reach my eyes. I wondered if pity made me feel this way.

(I set up the tripod with the pinhole camera secured to the top. My first go at it. This day would be full of accidents and revelations, I smiled to think.)

No, it was not pity. It was acknowledgement of a fact of my existence. Someone would almost certainly provide stones to ballast my remains, maybe even a cross. A Celtic one, I hope, or perhaps a megalith of bluestone with my name inscribed in Ogham runes.

"Do you think so, sir? Do you really believe that?" whispers again in my head. I looked up into the sky. I shook my head. "Yes." My voice sounded odd in the boneyard air. The funny thing was, I really did believe it. Perhaps for the first time in my life, certainly as an adult, I did.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting. Open the shutter. Seven seconds. Good.)

Over a thousand miles and 47 years removed from the soil of my birth, I found myself standing in this alien graveyard with other old souls celebrating the knowledge that I would live as long as there were those who still remembered me. If I had thought to bring a flask, I would have raised a toast to our bones, mine clothed in flesh and those embraced by the sod around me.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting after having nudged the tripod by accident, startled as I was by screech of what may have been a crow behind me. A lone truck downshifts over on the road, low growl bringing back memories of a long-ago road trip where I see the silhouette of my maternal grandmother against the side window. I wipe sudden moisture from the corner of my eye, and press the shutter release. Click like bones. Nine seconds. Click.)

Standing there waiting for the time to be up on the exposure, I decided that I did know something of love. Imperfect and incomplete, perhaps, but mine own knowledge. I know that I am loved. But the true test for me, the gauge and bellwether to guide me, is not so much the love I receive as it is the love I can give. This exhilarated and frightened me.

"How much can you give?" The voice, disguised as the murmur of wind-blown grass mixed with the songs of birds, asked me.

I let go of the shutter release. Images irreversibly burned into the film, to be taken on faith and unearthed later. The opening of that which seems tightly closed, to let in the light which provides form and depth to the shapeless darkness we far too often hold to close. We open, we illuminate, we develop.

We become, in the presence of light. We are formed, in light...in love.

"How much can I give?" I whispered to the bones and the prairie earth. A score of heartbeats passed. There was no answer, it seemed. I gathered my equipment and headed back to the car. The clunk of the door shutting nearly made me miss the reply when it came.

"More than you believe possible. Open your heart."

I gasped. That was it. I will open my heart, letting in others, forming myself in love. By such poetic measures we all become light. We all become love.

Prayer Flags on Everest Cerebrum

Some time ago I discovered the delightful artifacts known as prayer flags, those humble yet amazing pieces of cloth whose purpose came to fill me with delight. Their roots are in India, they blossomed in Tibet (known as lung ta or darchor depending on the style) and somehow ended up flying in the cool winds caressing the Mount Everest of my mind.

It is my understanding that traditionally, the flags are used to promote compassion, strength, wisdom and peace. The idea is that the prayers and mantras written on the flags will be carried by the wind into the surrounding space. Thus, by power of the wind, good will is carried to all. Hanging the flags in high places, especially those with frequent or powerful winds, is considered to be especially effective.

Lately I find myself struggling with the ideas of compassion, strength, wisdom and peace. How to find them within myself, and how to help spread them throughout the world. It seems to me that all of us could use more of each. I am acutely aware of the struggle within myself to overcome the base impulses that led me away from those four elements. I see and hear what is happening in the world and am saddened but also amazed at the feelings created within my head and heart.

I have written "flying some prayer flags for you on the Everest of my mind" quite often in my correspondence with my friends and acquaintances over the interwebs. I don't recall the first time I used those words, but I do recall thinking I was quite clever in my turn of phrase. It has not been until recently that it occurred to me it was more than triteness meant to convey solidarity or sympathy. I mean, it is that, but has also become much more to me.

I know now that I will almost certainly never climb Mount Everest, or even venture into the foothills of that majestic, legendary mountain. My life path and circumstances will most likely not allow it. At one time, that notion made me very sad; I don't have to climb it, but I would love to at least see it with my own two eyes, breathe the cold crystalline air sweeping down it flanks.

At the same time, I know that I may never get to see some of the dear people I consider to be my friends of the electronic age, as much as the notion pains me. This does not stop me from wishing them love, peace, and good fortune in whatever life is serving up to them. So if I can't get to the mountain, I will bring the mountain to me.

The space within my mind may be infinite if I wish it so. I could build cities marching to the horizon, oceans unbounded or invisible forests if I so desired. But with all that is going on in our lives, dear ones, I have chosen to create a shield against the negative energy that threatens us. I am forcing up a mountain range from the tectonic plates of my soul, the anchor of which is this Everest I think has grown from my heart.

It fits there, in the space behind my eyes, a stereo vision overlay on the shared hallucination that is our world. The winds blow strong and swift in the crystalline cerulean sky around the Everest I see. The flanks of the mountain are dotted with bits of bright fabric, seeming almost alive as the flags I have hung for you swirl in their eager arabesques and tarantellas and tangos upon the wind.

Lately my heart has grown weary of the hardness and stone of its typical existence. There are cracks, like those of a shell surrounding a chick. My heart is trying to break out so as to share in this world...to share with you, my fellow humans. In the foothills, I kneel and turn my gaze toward the mountain. In my hands are lung ta, inscribed with prayers and the names of those I know and those I wish to know.

The shadows hang blue upon the valley, dear ones. I fly my flags in the wind. May they bring you compassion, strength, wisdom and peace.

Devil's Hatband

Hot. Hot like the hell. Another round of temperatures exceeding the 100° mark, and it looks like we are headed for 110° in the next two days or so. Folks are predicting new records for the KCMO area. I am inclined to believe them. This is heat I haven't felt for some time, and never for so long. The yard is turning into brown chaff faster than sprinklers can restore it. When I look out the window I sigh and shake my head.

"There is nothing to be done," intones the hollow voice in my head. We water, we "tsktsk", we wonder: when will it rain? Rain enough to make a difference? I grow tired of waiting.

Drought conditions persist, not enough work, water or money. August is approaching. This means I am facing ten months without an architecture job of which to speak. This means that the rain has stopped. The cisterns such as I had are swiftly draining. I can see the bottoms now, this makes me very nervous. I have lost my rain-making juju. This vexes me greatly.

The lake level has dropped, you can see the stumps now. There is baked mud where used to be pond weed and lilies, frogs and fish. The trails of dying fish can be seen in the hard grey earth of the dry bottom. They flipped and flopped, gasping for air in the heat, perhaps not comprehending their fate. I can only know by imagination what they felt. The idea of suffocating in air, gills drying out, tongue blackening, is truly unsettling. I don't know it physically. I do know it mentally. My bad dreams have shown me the path into the desert.

Grim, I know. Not the sort of thing we really enjoy discussing in polite company. I try to avoid inflicting these inner terrors on those around me, and those for whom I care. I am, as you may have noticed, not a complete success in that endeavor. Witness the words I spill for you now.

I stepped out in the heat today, on multiple occasions. There were errands to run, lunch to be had, sprinklers to be adjusted. While I was out, I saw that the flower bed at the front of the house was suffering an incursion of pesky grasses and bindweed. This was a bit much for me, having been parked in front of my computer trying to piece together some fragmented areas of my domestic life. I was in an ornery state. The agitation arising from my contemplation of the figuratively disappearing lake spurred me into action. The grasses and the weeds, they didn't stand a chance.

I ripped. I pulled. I tore out handfuls of vegetation, reveling in the discharge of energy. It felt good to flex and move. The heat made me sweat profusely, but even that felt invigorating. As is often the case, the distraction of a well-defined task allowed my mind to let go of some Stuff. This freed it up in turn to contemplate some Things. Things like that slowly evaporating lake in my mind.

If the idea of vanishing water and sun-baked stumps seemed bleak, the lower level of the lake also presented opportunities. That which was once hidden by the murky water was now coming to light again. What used to be wreckage could now be salvaged. Ideas and ambitions, hopes and fears, exposed again to the light of the day-mind. Now I could wade into the shallows and drag them back to higher ground. Something good could be reclaimed from things I believed to be lost.

Cool water splashes on my calves and back. In my peregrinations around the flowerbed, I had wandered into the arc of the sprinkler out in the yard. The shock of the water reminded me by contrast, of the heat. The mirage in my head popped out of existence and I came back to this world. The sun burned like a plasma cutter and I heard the voice of my father saying "It's hotter than the Devil's hatband out there!"

I wipe the sting from my eyes. There was curse making its way to the tip of my tongue, but I swear I could taste a little lake water there, so I bite back on the epithets. The Devil's hatband might as well be on my brow, the sweat pouring down my face in direct contradiction to the drought all around me. The drought, though, seems less threatening. It's change that creates difficulties which can be hard to overcome. Still, with change comes opportunity. The heat may brown the grass and dry the leaves, but this time I'll save the seeds I've gathered, in anticipation of the rains I know will surely come.

The Fields Are Ripe With Grain

As a testament to my distraction, I finally noticed today that, in the month of May, I had only posted twice to this here soapbox I call Irish Gumbo. A pity, really. Judging by the torrent of thoughts and ideas rushing through my noggin these past twenty-nine days I would have guessed my real output to have been much higher. Alas, that is not the case.

I haven't met my usual standard, methinks. Much of my writing occurs in my head, long before it hits the page, digital or otherwise, but it still makes it to some form of reality. The month of May has been for my writing self a mirage. A phantom. A figment. There has been much to say. I have created fiction, non-fiction and that intersection of the two called real life. Short stories, novellas, novels, anthologies, all have been cranked out in my Gutenberg mind.

Sadly, dear readers, as you can tell this fecundity has not made it to the page. The noise and clatter of the world has pulled me away from my explorations, and I regret that I have not set aside more time to the transcription of the stories in my overheated mind.

There has been intense and prolonged change in my world, stretched out over months. I have moved long distances physically, emotionally and spiritually. I have questioned many things in my life, seeking right answers to very hard questions. I have sought to overcome a stretch of unemployment that has now run close to eight months. Mentally, I am in a high state of attenuation, my mind and heart strings over the fretboard.

A chance encounter with a local bookstore/small printing house owner delivered unto me the opportunity to perhaps have some of my work professionally edited and printed, ideally in a small run. The past two days, I have had the good fortune to devote long stretches to editing my own writing.The effort I have been blessed to expend has left me with a sense of nervous excitement at the possibilities that may open up before me. This is a good thing, and perhaps the closest I have come yet to really being published. 


What I need is time. I need more time. I haven't thought this big in a long time, and I don't want to stop. But time is crucial. It is not an infinite resource for those of us fated to walk this mortal coil; the imperative is to make the most of the moment before us. This I want to do, dear ones. I have to make the most of this moment of 'compilation' even if it means 'creation' must temporarily rest.


I want to make beautiful things, my lovelies. Creation is sustenance. Never in my life has it come so clear to me that now is the time to make what I want to do and what I need to do coincide. Wish me luck.

Through Which Roars the River

It was a few days ago at breakfast that the white hole opened up in the center of my mind to pour forth a new light of wonder into my dormant heart. Across from me sat Love; I walked over that bridge Einstein had created for me and into a new creation. The river gushed forth to sweep me away. I was near speechless, on the verge of tears of joy. Love in all its glory seized me by the heart and refused to let go.

That river of the mind found its temporal twin today, under a sky of pure cerulean punctuated by the commas of swallows swooping through the air. It was pressure in my mind and heart that pushed me out of my new home with cameras in hand. The pressure, the call to find some water, or train tracks or something like them. I found my way down to the banks of the Missouri river where it flows past downtown Kansas City.

It was there that the great blue and the breeze and the slow dance of the river made it clear to me that change is inevitable and often necessary, ever the more so in the case of finding peace within ourselves and love without. It is up to us to guide that change where possible, and go with it when it is ever so larger than our hearts.

The Missouri showed me this. Mighty bridges cross it. Its banks have been shaped by the hands of man. There are gates and valves, sluices and levees placed in an effort to manage cosmic uncertainty as manifested by water. On a peaceful day, under a bright blue sky, in the company of the occasional branch floating lazily along one might be tempted to believe that this placid river could not possibly ever be out of control.

But look closer. Look at the marks on the riverbanks. The driftwood here, the odd bit of flotsam there. See the rusty barrel five feet above the water line, the faint red paint set off against sun-dried silt baked to the color of pewter in the Midwestern sun. It is then that the old high water marks make themselves known. The depth gauges painted on the piers of the bridges suddenly come into focus. They look worn. They look used. Obviously, something swift and fierce has passed this way.

That swift and fierce thing swept over me again today, out there in the sun. I stood still, camera poised to capture an elaborate combination of light and shadow that had caught my eye. The instant the shutter clicked I flashed back to that morning at the breakfast table, across from Love, and the switch flicked in my heart. The white hole opened up to pour forth its energy of creation and it spilled down into my heart there on the banks of the Missouri, flowing down the levee and into the water, the circuit, it closed and the energy of the earth, the sun, the river, the Universe it poured back into a thousand fold, I knew it, I knew it there and then, I felt its majesty, I felt love all around me with my feet on the ground and my head in the sky and my heart in the hands of another, knowing beyond a shadow of all my doubts that we must tear down the dams we build in the rivers of our heart, risking the flood for the fullness of being…

…We must, dear ones. We must undam the rivers of heart-space-time to let them burst forth and carry us to where we can find that which gives us life, that which makes us human. Embrace the singularity. Cross your own event horizons. Come out the other side and into Love.