Love Is Seeking You

MY UPCOMING PERFORMANCE IN NEW YORK CITY

Join me as I read poetry

at The Strand bookstore
828 Broadway, New York City
7:30 pm on Friday, September 13

I'll be opening for three interesting and skillful poets:
Ariana Reines
and
CAConrad
and
Zoe Brezsny


Here's more info.

In the meantime, check out Ariana Reines' sensational new book
A Sand Book, and read my review of it.

Here's my favorite book by CAConrad:
ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness

Find Zoe Brezsny's poetry here.


Photo of me preparing





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Read past issues of the newsletter.

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SLOW BUT SURE BREAKTHROUGHS

Now and then you may be able to whip up a wonderful breakthrough in a magic moment. But more often it's the case that beauty and truth and love and justice emerge in their full glory only over the course of a painstaking, step-by-step, trial-and-error process.

"All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting," wrote Japanese painter Hokusai. "At 73 I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110 everything—every dot, every dash—will live."





LOVERS FIND SECRET PLACES

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.

Love says, There are.

— Rumi, from “Secret Places,” Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart - as rendered by Coleman Barks





THE WORLD DESIRES YOU

Jane Brunette, aka Flamingseed, suggests this game: Instead of being the one who does the desiring, imagine instead that everything desires you.

Your morning coffee really wants you to taste it.

The trees are yearning for you to notice the bright green of their leaves.

The breeze wants you to enjoy it’s soft touch on your cheek.

Even the ground under your shoes is waiting for you to notice the lively sensation it creates as you walk.

Suddenly, the world lights up — and so do you. When we feel wanted, it’s natural to feel enlivened in response. Our desire takes its rightful place as the fire of presence and enjoyment of what is, instead of the burning need to get what’s not here.

Doing this practice, we will derive satisfaction from a whole variety of ordinary things that we normally overlook, since our attention won’t be occupied with waiting for a specific object to please us. Now, there is no need to wait, because everything we encounter has satisfaction built into it. With desire spread out all over the world, its enlivening quality is no longer confined to one object that we may or may not get.

This little game can trick you into mindful presence, even as it helps wear down your usual relationship to desire. It is a simple, playful way to meditate as you go about your daily life. Try it for short little bursts — and rather than thinking of it as a task, let the enjoyment that comes be the fuel that naturally makes you want to do it more and more.

Read more.





REAL LISTENING

Abraham Maslow's definition of real listening: to listen "without presupposing, classifying, improving, controverting, evaluating, approving or disapproving, without dueling what is being said, without rehearsing the rebuttal in advance, without free-associating to portions of what is being said so that succeeding portions are not heard at all."





EVERYONE'S A NOBODY AND NOBODY'S PERFECT

Keep two pieces of paper in your pockets at all times. One says "I am a speck of dust," and the other, "The world was created for me."

- Rabbi Bunim of P’shiskha

P.S.: Neither is true and both are true.





HOW TO TUNE IN TO THE HIDDEN BEAUTY

What do you need to kill off in yourself in order to tune in to the beauty that's hidden from you? What worn-out shticks are blinding you to the blessings that life is conspiring to give you?

Which of your theories may have been useful and even brilliant in the past but are now keeping you from becoming aware of the ever-fresh creation that unfolds before you?





In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.

―Maxine Hong Kingston





YOUR HOLY IMAGINATION

Listen to a spoken-word version of this rap

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It's your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. It's the magic wand you use to shape your future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out images of what you will be doing later.

The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of yourself eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of some year building your dream home by a lake or sea.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned with your deepest desires. In fact, it's an indispensable tool in creating the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests on this planet unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We're often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values. That's the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and from other influential people in our past.

Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those fearful fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end meditations.

Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we're blasting ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren't good for us and that we don't really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of black magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists deride as the "monkey mind." It's the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly spins out pictures that zip around with the energy of an agitated animal. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind's slapdash chatter, we can be fully attuned to the life that's right in front of us. Only then are we able to want what we actually have.

But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one constant: The prophecies of our imagination tend to be accurate. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are all-too-often reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations.

Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let's consider that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will happen does tend to materialize?

Here's the logical conclusion: It's downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect blessings.

That's one reason why I'm reverent in composing my messages for you. If I'm to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.

Listen to a spoken-word version of this rap





GENERATE THE FREE BRAIN

Instructions from poet Kenneth Patchen:

1. Discourage all traces of shame.
2. Bear no cross.
3. Extend all boundaries.
4. Blush perpetually in gaping innocence.
5. Burrow beneath the subconscious.
6. Pass from one world to another in carefree devotion.
7. Exhaust the primitive.
8. Generate the free brain.
9. Forgo no succulent filth.
10. Verify the irrational.
11. Acquire a sublime reputation.
12. Make one monster at least.
13. Multiply all opinions.
14. Inhabit everyone.





ANGER IS THE DEEPEST FORM OF COMPASSION?

David Whyte says: “ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt.

“Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care; the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.

“What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding.

“What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.”

- From David Whyte’s book, "Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words”





SING TALKING

If you were to approach the mountain village of Kongthong in India, you might notice the cacophony of peculiar bird calls echoing through the jungle. They wouldn't sound like any birds that you had heard before, though — these songs come from the villagers themselves.

They call to their neighbors in song. They sing to their children in to eat. They rhapsodize to find each other in the jungle.

Each song is unique, and each one refers to a specific individual. The practice, known as *jingrwai lawbei*, means each villager is given a musical name alongside their more traditional one.

MORE





IMMORAL TO ONLY COMPLAIN

In my value system, it is immoral to complain and denounce and deprecate without ever praising; it's immoral to compulsively criticize without also identifying—at least now and then—what's working well.






THE PEOPLE I TRUST MOST

The people I trust the most are those who are always tenderly wrestling and negotiating with their own shadows, making preemptive strikes on their personal share of the world's evil, fighting the good fight to keep from spewing their darkness on those around them. I aspire to be like that.





WANT TO GET YOUR PERSONAL ASTROLOGICAL CHART READ?

If you want your personal chart done, I recommend a colleague whose approach to reading astrology charts closely matches my own. She's my wife, RO LOUGHRAN. Her website is here.

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation. She is skilled at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your connection with your own inner wisdom.

In addition to over 30 years of astrological experience, Ro has been a licensed psychotherapist for 17 years. She integrates psychological insight with astrology's cosmological perspective.

Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.

Check out Ro's website.