Fixie

“It’s a very simple machine.  I feel very connected to what’s going on.”

Will says this as we’re riding together on a crystalline Sunday as the clock arcs to noon and then crests it as we race like mad on the straightaway home.

Fixed gear bikes, or “fixies” are really a throwback to the first bikes—your feet do not coast but must continually turn as the gears do.  You can also pedal backward—and go backward (if you are skilled enough to not simply crash), and in this way a fixie echoes the very concept of time, at least as cutting edge scientists are now suggesting—as likely to work in reverse as forward… ultimately existing only as a way by which we experience ourselves, but in no ultimate sense real, fixed, sequential or causal:  it’s just one big eternal now, even if that blows us out of the matrix of our socially and neurologically constructed “reality.”

But I’m not here to hate on time.  Bob Dylan suggests that time is a jet plane, and it moves too fast.  Sometimes in parenting this is true, but sometimes time’s a slug and it moves too slow.  Maybe time’s a fixie and goes either way, or maybe a fixie’s just a fixie and a nice bike ride is an eternal pleasure, at least on a stunning fall day as golden red leaves tumble whimsically out of blue and branch.

Thus as we strive beyond ill-timed notions of immortality altogether and trade up toward an eternal to be found perpetually, in all directions, in all situations, in all beings and non-beings—again and again our children, the present moment and love, in all its manifestations, prove to be timelessly pulsing teachers of what it’s all about.

Namaste

Native Spirit

What do the feathers of the fallen say?

On a branded monetized sanitized unoccupied day?

Due to the nature of entanglement, we’re best offering Thanks for this moment.

We’ve been every sort of bad and every sort of good, we’re the violence and we’re the hood.

The sacred and profane, they kinda get together, but in the light of day there’s an inclement “whether?”

So we run run away, yet there’s a luminescent tether…

Maybe it’s all about love

“What are you, Johnny Appleseed?” Peter said, with what felt like mocking contempt.  He was teaching me to be a psychologist, a certain kind of psychologist.

Navy blazer, grey slacks, leather chairs, the austerity of analytic psychology itself a gardened hedge against the chaos of badly wounded psyches and the mayhem of human behavior.

Who am I to plant seeds?  And besides, perhaps it’s the tree itself, and not the snake much less God 2.0, that has played us:  “Hey kids, whatever you do, do not eat that fruit.”  It’s not only bears that shit in the forest.  Really love your peaches, but your tree shakes me.

It was a woman’s hundredth birthday party when I saw Peter in a lovely, albeit cool and drizzly, garden.  Over twenty years his blue eyes had grown soft and his graying beard was soft too.  His leather jacket was soft and his velvet handshake as good as a hug.  Looking into my eyes he said, about therapy, but probably about everything:  “It’s all about love.”

We have a little time

“We have a little time,” said my son, sitting at the kitchen island, alert by an extra hour “saved” by changing the clocks around.

So we talked about fear, about movies and about how things that we know are not “real” scare us nonetheless.  I tried to explain the brain, our mythos, our culture of fear, but only because I love my boy.  Yet we all love all the world, don’t we?

It was time to go, so we continued to talk in the car.  He said, “I’m not scared when I’m not alone.”

In and out of the Way of Parenting

We have no clue what mysterious force conceived our collective child.

She lands upon the steps before any church or temple has sprouted from stone, before God is even conceived by humans

Can we allow parenting to wind-sweep and wave-wash us until we’re sea-glass—smooth and soft and of great value only to children who are young enough to see the subtle heart of spirit in all things?

—Tao Te Ching (well… sort of, I made it up—but was inspired by other translations)

The Tao Te Ching has been translated many times and in many different ways.  The legend of the text holds that 2600 years ago Lao Tzu (which means something like “old sage” or “old baby”) wrote down his wisdom shortly before his disgust with the chaos and disorder of his civilization compelled him to get out of Dodge and head for the mountains.

While I would highly recommend reading the Tao Te Ching as an inspiring text to help with parenting and with cultivating a tranquil and loving approach to the challenges of life, I’m personally striving to work my way to live the wisdom of Tao and that means less words and more stillness and non-action (albeit in the service of Love and compassion for all our collective children and our world).

Thus a little poetry here, a little cooking there, a walk to coffee, pick-up and drop off, pay bills and earn money, sleep and dream and meditate on the dreams… read the writings of my fellows, share my words, try to listen more, and more deeply, striving to hear the subtle spirit in the music all around us.

I hope this wasn’t too dreary or obscure to read today; I wish my words will bring just a little bit of extra peace to your heart, an enlivening of the feeling of abundance and trust in our shared world and our shared experience, a vivification of love and softness and surrender, a quickening of that noble parenting warrior who knows how to be tough and so can be gentle without thinking himself or herself weak.

Namaste, BD