In one breath

Words are often mistaken as the way we communicate. Though we can explain our intentions with words, it is only through our actions that we truely convey what we mean. Words are the abstraction of action. The concept of the Eight Fold Path goes further in expressing my intention here.

Believe in Bare Feet

There are some things that you hear and you what them to be true so you believe. There are other things that you hear and when you think about them are true as shown by the way of the world. This is what we build our belief from. Energy, as a force connecting, causing and perpetuating the flow of atoms to the enormity of the sum is one of the things that if you think about you will feel its truth.

To be healthy, walk bare foot each day. Make true contact with the earth for tow logical reasons: allow what ever static charge that has built up in your body discharge, and feel energy that is inherent in the the planet. The latter will require practice as you might be desensitized by years of unintentional bare foot walking. Indeed, like playing a bamboo flute, you must relearn how to breath with intention.

Stay warm, love more than you did before

Denaturing the Human

There is balance between the natural world, the intellectual world and the spiritual world. Nature is the only means to awaken the depths of the natural being just as study is the only way to awaken the depths of the intellectual mind. We cannot replace one with another; Thirds of the Whole- Mind Body Soul. There is no "only way" in life, there is balance or there is endless cascading of consequence. To think we can be whole and healthy without nature would be a product of strict intellectual belief for we know of nothing outside of nature.

A working knowledge of the natural world is the greatest root for rational thinking. If left to the intellect alone there is no limit to what will be concluded as fact (Aristotle and his belief that heavy objects fell faster than lighter objects). Knowledge is vulnerable to the powerful and historically has been used as a tool for oppression, whether by direct information/misinformation or the suppression of. Einstein would of said it is imagination that inspires knowledge, he would of also spoke of the importance of the milky way to gaze upon to grow imagination.

The imagination is a natural thing capable of creating that which has never been known before. Imagination, just as the night sky, has been greatly effected by industrialization and media. Children are awe inspired by movies rather than the true mysteries of nature. They enter into the world led by technology and understand nature to be a city park or tract of land surrounded by highyways or neighborhoods.

Unlike the intellect, nature is limited. It cannot be controlled by man like an economy. This is why greedy men must destroy it rather than allow the people to understand it. Nature is where we were once free, and it is though nature that we can overcome the capitalistic oppression. First world culturalization has been a process of removal from the natural world; you can't control a people who know how to live off the land.

There is a subtlety to nature as well that cannot be known by any other means than in-depth experience. This requires a great level of discipline and time. It requires one to transcend the notions of comfort and ego, to face fears and find a greater sense of connection; sense of self in the community of creation, rather than alone in the narrow minded race of mankind. If one never tastes fresh water from a mountain stream they will not know the purity of nature. They will know only manufactured purity: acceptable levels of pollution; cancer and disease. Just as a polluted river is undrinkable, the men and women of modern culture are polluted in their mind and body.

We must transcend mind and body to learn from the spirit. If the body is unhealthy with pollutants and the mind corrupt with lies, it leaves one anchored to ego/attachment, ill equipped to let go and flow into the soul. "The burdens of the body weigh heavy upon the mind. A mind weakened with lies cannot overcome these burdens and will seek attachment to ego rather than letting go. Religious dogma will cauterize this wound. It will satisfy the seeker's unrest due to the broken connection and suppress the imagination through symbolic belief. A slave in mind and body will call confuse spirit with intellect and love with attachment." The most unique human characteristic is the ability to convince ourselves of anything- to believe anything.

What about the evolution of culture; "the children born into this without a choice". When balance is lost there is no choice but to go with the fall. A child has no choice because they have been removed from nature and are subjects to the will of the contrivances of intellect alone. Author Richard Louv writes on this in his book "Last Child In the Woods" . The result of a "denatured" being can be seen at the zoo: animals in cages estranged from their instincts. On a cultural level we see succeeding generations with increasing numbers of distracted, maladjusted children. A child will see clearly if distractions are removed- that is nature, which we are at odds with. Instead of acknowledging distractions we administer psycho-active drugs to chemically adjust the natural function of the brain. This is the product of unchecked intellectual domination of nature, both of the land and of our species.

Spiritual existence thrives through a connection to nature as well as physical health and stimulated intellect.

Knowledge can be contrived, nature cannot- this is balance.

The body acts out what the mind thinks- this is balance.

The soul is timeless, the self is in time- this is balance.

"I am not the energy, the energy is me."

the junk, they say
is nothing more than the lowest pleasure in the pile
I say love complete, free junk
they say they are the rulers

a junkie
I am nothing more than the lowest breathing child, not lovable
I scheme to relieve the burden to the soil
I run in the dark, to the darker shadows
I bring a little light

they see
they say "junkie in the dark"
they say, soaked in light, vibrant like a lie discovered
they drown a junkie's breath
they speak for him and profess:
No arguing, amid misspoken and crude compassion
drift on junkie, go back to shadows

The Pile
a circle of pleasure;
some better because they cost
some worse because they're free
free junk though, like breathing
I paid the gist but
I missed the blink- it just stared into my eye as I was breathing
I acted as I would in a memory, in fact I act the same even when I forget
My words spoke: Love Complete
but they were the rulers, they drift on dollars
sweat lie and leave muddy faced junkies to drown in cities breath
create guilt and draw a hard line that the rain doesn't even clean;
grow a garden that doesn't feed a child, and bury everything in the ground

Eastbound on the train: the Spirit of the Rockies

The river, flanked by highway, however sensitive the architect, pains me in the same way releasing an arrow into the heart of a delicate creature would. It is necessary, sophistication; destruction in order to feed the mass. With no emotion, cars, trucks, pointed east or west, drive in the rain leaving behind a mixture of water vapor and pollution.

It rains in the Rockies. On a train, the gentle jostling, two stories above the ground looking down as a bird in flight might. Every detail cataloged until the sum is seen, then the gaze grows as sheep graze pasture. Beauty abounds where any third of the the whole is nurtured.

These mountains and rivers, this land, known to me as mother but to many more, as Colorado, stretches on, steep the south, steep to the north. The names of these places or these people come and go like the rain on the window. My full view; my total attention is paid to nature and I know not one single word or name to call her by. I only call her "mother" for she bore such beauty as only the female of any gait, wing span or otherwise, could. Snow falls and I remember.

It was two years, on this same train even, rolling through the Rockies, I said good-bye to the mountains and deserts that had occupied my life for so long. I had grown, tethered to intention and held by passion in the fissures of mountains, climbing high above the themes that weigh down most in this culture. I traveled humbly in the canyons of the desert, learning solitude; silence. I was letting go, I was promising my love to another. I was to grow again as a sailor.

All of that was behind me. I travel east today with no ambition; I am complete, ready to grow again.

I see the footprint of sophistication expanding in its irrepressible absurdity: Tyvex covered plywood, bare concrete foundations; New houses closer together than poles on a horseshoe pit. In typical American "style", houses built in stark contrast with their surroundings. This is what it means to live in the Rockies; this is the rugged romance of life dying before my eyes.

These houses, strangely enough, remind me of my indian; the shred of my soul that remains man after my total disillusionment. I feel the mountains, even aboard the train. I feel the comfort of the cold, of the presents of the mountain goat and I feel the forests of the north west as the precipitation passes high above them bringing the snow to cover these peaks for another winter, as it has been for since the vastness of recent history. I feel the canyons, the vessels who carry the frozen ocean melt through one of the driest parts of our world, onward to home; to the sea from which it came. Even though I know sophistication has brought an end to that cycle, I still feel it; it is the the intention of mother and it is still. I feel a part of this world; this intention; these winds and rains and the snow; these creatures; these goats, more than I do among the sheep who graze on the browned grass of a culture holden to a prosperity, not of intention but of rejection of nature. I've graze with them until I choked. I spit it out and now everyone offers me some of theirs.

I am not ungrateful. Though I appreciate the efforts of many and the offers of community, I breathe better in the mountains. I feel better drinking the water from the stream.

Now the snow, pines and shrub stacked against the sky, fly high beyond where I can see from this window. I think how the people of these mountains moved down to the plains before winter came. The were led by the elders; by wisdom. The tradition was passed from father to son; from chief to warrior; from spirit to man. When the wisdom has been forgotten; when the elders advise the young to "sophisticate"; to shun nature in their prosperity. It is warrior spirit alone that rediscovers the path.

Without a boat, bicycle or much to speak of, I'm growing again, returning to the beginning, to begging again as a warrior in spirit, to travel the path away from sophistocation, far enough to find balance.

I turn to this pen as so many turn to the hand-held attention clinchers that sound and giggle in their pockets. I express not to another under social scrutiny, but to paper; a mirror of my thinking. The indian in me sings in this land. Even aboard this steel chariot a connection is made. Rhythem transcends. Rolling along the track, through the canyons and meadows of the rockies, which a harmonica; a voice, the rthym rises from deep. The song is simple and sounds true to the heart; the body that produces the sound- it is the song of the human, sung long ago but the people who lived under the sun, sanf in the rain and prepaired for winter. Thirds of the whole- one is enough in troubled times to show connection to intention. As seed grows to tree, and tree to fruit: mind body soul; thirds of the whole. I feel my nature calling out, the male beneath the fabric, the man dumbed with deodorant and fine grooming screaming a war cry.

My warrior spirit is not violent for the bloodshed yields to solution to the plight of a people. The violence is simply frustration in response to sophistication; it is natural, violence, but it is expressed as a tree in a city- coerced in its growing and groomed to fit the surroundings. I cry my war, I don't throw it through windows or shoot it into cities. I disagree with those who give in, who say there is no good in refraining from the way of sophisticated human economic pursuit. I accept my role as the one to be left behind; forgotten by the glamor of stupid animals. I will in the lest, know the taste of fresh water. And if I find a woman, if we have a child that child will know the taste of fresh water. That child will know the beauty of nature, not the blackness of strict desire.

Just as nature itself is no longer understood, my love as well is as a whisper in a city. I yield to the flow to show me. I give more space to the rest become whatever it will. The foundation is not worthy of redecoration; the walls are stained with the blood of innocent, the same walls upon which we hang our art. Senslessness prevails. We preceed on momentum alone; out-of-control.