The God of My Salvation I awoke rattled to my bones. Adrift. Spiritually rudderless. Lost in an abyss of darkness. Ancient familial and unknown spirits seemed to claw at my soul, or whatever it was they hungered for. A bleak and desolate place. All knowing left me. As if I
The Irish Art of Cosmic Surrender. A Profane Theology of Letting Go. Not fuck you. Not fuck off. Not even fuck that. Just, ah, sure, fuck it. Three little words. Four if you count the ah. An entire spiritual teaching, delivered without ceremony, incense, or the slightest pretence of enlightenment.
Stand by your man. Stand by your woman. Fuck the gender wars. Don't buy it. Don't believe it. Don't swallow the fucking story. We have been cooperating for millions of years. Badly. Very fucking badly. And yet here we are. Men and women, still
An affirmation for the gloriously unfinished human being. Fuck your trauma. There. Doesn't that feel better? Say it again. Fuck your trauma. Not because it didn't happen. Not because it wasn't awful. Not because you should have got over it by now. But because
On emotion, reason, and the quiet abandonment of the self A feeling can arrive with the force of revelation. It can be immediate, overwhelming, utterly convincing. The body responds, the heart accelerates, the mind begins assembling its evidence. Something is wrong. Something must be wrong. How else could it feel
Still Life Velvet Smooth Fecund Dark Clamorous Lost domain Still Waiting Still Ceaseless Rich thick with gifts and gods and ghouls Spacious Mortifying Edifying Emptiness Silence Sit. Till. This fertile soil I can make a great deal of noise without opening my mouth. Any old argument will do. Add a
A brief history of grasping Opposable thumbs. A small rebellion in the body. The hand turned back on itself. Finger meeting thumb. Self meeting self. A circle closed. A circuit completed. And in that closing, something opened. Not innocence. Power. We learned to grip. Not just the branch, but the
° A sideways view of all that is and has been ° The train to Boyle is all cows and canals, the soma tumult of loco motive below a soft flow of slow conversing, broken only by the crackling comms. Ivy and willow and ailing ash, water reeds and lilies, bursting boisterous
On intimacy without arrival Lambay lies to the east, closer to the rising sun than the land it split from aeons past. It sees its source before the mainshore does. Huge basking sharks, gaping-mouthed, drift by like toothless guardians, four, five at a time. And presumably the plankton too.
On roses, machines and friendship I woke in the early hours with my mind at it again. Turning things over. Returning to the same places, as though another circuit might reveal an exit I had missed. I knew the stories. I knew something of where they came from, the old
On the life held between tides The sea’s brown soul Washed ashore On tidal stone. Still life, waiting For home To return, To reclaim. Into salty flux, And drowned hush Of to and fro Still, it waits For the next inhale Of ocean’s breath. In clouded hours, Unknowing
Quan Yin, heartbreak and the limits of explanation I moved mats twice before the ceremony began. The first two places felt too close to the people around me. Eventually I settled beside the entrance to the temple dome, where there was more space. That was the practical reason for sitting