Vacation Cage…

When you click and drag

yourself across the world

there is always the dull

remainder of the original

left behind. Not as bright

as what’s moving on.

A thin curtain of pixels

clings

like a spider’s molt.

In a new city, a webcam

no one watches is watching

you and you feel the terrible

vacuum between lens

and audience. You laugh,

but no one laughs back.

A life is lead by learning,

before each breath,

how to breathe. You sit down.

You’re either a sheet of glass

turning back into sand

or a suit woven of smoke.

The concept of time starts over.

…..Matt Rasmussen

the intensity of the dense and ever-emerging expansion of attention immerses us in the careful weighing in of doubt and space and boundaries…..may you allow yourself to encounter the bound self, relinquish and spark the unknowable…

One of the great virtues of Susan Griffin’s ‘The Eros of Everyday Life’ is how it draws our attention to the fundamentally relational sense of the word ‘eros’ and resituates it at the center of the intricate web of relationships within which we live. Drawing on Hesiod’s ancient cosmogonic sense of the word, she considers eros as that which draws us toward those highly charged meetings, encounters with the ‘other,’ what which makes possible the fluid, dynamic exchanges that take place in such encounters, and the very life that emerges from them. To inhabit the world of eros means recognizing that borders- between oneself and another, between human beings and the more-than-human world, between matter and spirit- are permeable, that life emerges nowhere else so fully and deeply as it does in the exchange across these borders. What does it feel like to inhabit the world in this way, to relinquish the habitual tendency to stand against the world, to see the world as somehow existing outside of or beyond oneself, and instead allow oneself to become immersed in the world, suffused with its life and spirit? Perhaps we should speak, as anthropologist Michael Jackson does, of the ‘penumbral’ region as the space we enter and inhabit in moments of intense and  expansive awareness. ‘To speak of the penumbral,’ Jackson suggests, ‘is to invoke this hazy and indeterminate region between a world where we experience ourselves as actors and a world where we experience ourselves as acted upon.’ It means relinquishing control and allowing oneself to feel and be touched by the presence of the life that is continuously emerging around and within us; to be absorbed into it in a kind of ecstasy. Ecstasy begets intimacy, an intimate knowledge that can come to us only through relinquishment of a narrow, bounded self and an openness to an ever-changing sense of participation in a larger whole……..Douglas E. Christie

encountering the self….

Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live- and begin to be. A boat-man stretched on the deck of his craft, and dallying with the noon, would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me, as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze……..Thoreau