Tumbleword

Meet the shop lifting bird  (HERE) a U-tube special of the evening.

Its a great Doritos commercial, not that a shoplifting seagull would sell his feathers for a fifteen minute stint at fame!!   Yes, this is another plug for junk food... spelled, pop culture.... gone wild.

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Dear Tyler,

Wherever you are right now... (probably in the library) I am really proud of you and grateful to know your soul.  Ps: If you are half as tired as I am you are in a coma.

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Happy 87th Birthday Nana!  They put your heart on the table and stitched it back together but they never touched your beautiful soul.  You are a miracle in spite of science.  I love you.

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Lest we forget, it is an honor to know anyone willing to feel the emotional turmoil of life's complication and still try to communicate it.  I think it is easier to just stop talking, to pretend.   

The human mind and body are so woven in layers of emotional and intellectual syntaptic strings, it is amazement, pure amazement to witness someone learning to try to pick up the threads of that tapestry and emotionally express what is unsayable by all the poets, philosophers, artists, novelists... it is a life's work to understand what it is to be human, in its personal and also socio-political complexity...

I say lets try to say I am (whatever that means to any one of us) ... and to always say Yes to life. To embrace the hard parts with the grace and bounty.  Even if we cry and bitch and fight just to do it.  Even if it angers some of those who claim to love us.  Stretch out.  Live. In Mansuetude, my tumbleword is this: Go past the finish line.  Redraw your boundry, re-classify yourself (even if it is Top Secret for a while).  Change the tone of your voice, your song... dance in the grocery store, ride the grocery carriage down towards your car (you know the parking lot is slanted to take the rain away from the front door, take advantage of its slope)...  For once in your life, yell up into the night sky, I exist!  Chant a new language... Don't forget to breathe...its a nice drug. 

Live as if you are being watched by the prize you wish to attain.  It already belongs to you... through desire--the most authentic measure of who you are and yes, who you will (in time) become.  Praise your dreams for coming, wish them luck and help them come into being the way you would help a plant or a child learn to express and to yes, to love.

I have been reading these poems for a while, tasting them slowly, going back to them as if they would change in the context of a changed season.  It is a lovely thing to read of the quiet of snow, its white blanketing, during a summer so hot and dry just lived through.  It is like a yen and yang thing, to approach the snowy tundra in imagination while it is parched outside and we are on drought rations of water for the gardens.

Here is one small sample of Yves Bonnefoy's poetry. 

 THE GARDEN

Life is full of misunderstandings.... don't sit in them. 

Don't wait.  Don't wait till its too late to tell someone you love that you care!  Don't wait to get out from behind the concrete barrier of your ego and your mind to say I am sorry, any moment might be too late.  We all know who we are, the ones with a big foot sticking out of our mouths, or an ankle and a foot, probably with a big shoe on or cleats.  I chewed off someone's head the other day, is it hanging in my mouth, like a hyena at a feast?  Something in me still sees it. 

It doesn't cost, language.  I mean it is free to us, a gift we get when we come to town, a life.  But it costs so much sometimes to say something simple, to say the kind thing or to not say anything. That is hard.  Silence is so frightening to most people, like it might be a black hole we might sink into.  Saying sorry is for some a "sorry ass thing to say", they wouldn't get caught dead with those words on their tongue. 

Or, is it that some of us have run out of sorry, like in a scrabble game, no more S or R or O vowels left to build the word... its not for points we are playing this word game it is our lives.  Our love.  Nothing blocks creativity like a dark cloud hanging in the mouth or heart or mind.  Poof, Puff, Puff it off .... open your mouth and blow it away, then make your tongue build the letters, taste them, say them, Sorry, or Hello, I miss you.  Whatever it is that needs to be said.  Before it's too late and we are talking to the absence of what is really present in our hearts!

Paul McCartney's tribute to John Lennon after Lennon's death.

In Mansuetude, this is where my heart resides.  This is my Tumbleword.  Don't Wait.