Stirrup of the Sun & Moon. Frank LaRue Owen

does their laugh sound like?

      What does the curve of their body feel like in the dark?

      All of this imagining gets the best of you.

      It stokes an image inside…The Ideal One.

      Don’t stand too close to the heat, pilgrim,

      for a fire has been lit

      and it’s burning up all of your common sense.

      This longing is ancient and powerful and vast.

      It feels like it might even swallow you up

      if you chose to stay with it.

      We can’t have that, now can we?

      So, you aim it all outward.

      You become a Human Movie Projector.

      “Hey you! Stand still! Stop moving! I’m busy projecting onto you.

      No. No. Don’t speak. You might ruin the moment.”

      Like a fisherman on the shoreline,

      you attach this inner image of The Ideal One

      onto a hook of your own making.

      You don’t realize you fashioned a hook, but you did.

      It happened somewhere between sleep and waking.

      Don’t be so hard on yourself.

      You were just following instructions;

      the same troubled, outworn instructions

      given to everybody else,

      and you followed them impeccably.

      You cast that inner image out —

      out into the world, every day.

      Multiple times a minute even.

      And so, there you are…hoping

      and hoping…and hoping

      “The One” will come and bite the hook.

      You’re fishing in your sleep again

      “fishing” in your “sleep” again

      not realizing the real prize-catch

      has been swimming inside you all along.

      Until we embrace the Indwelling One

      there is only exile in the Territory of Love

      …even if we somehow arrange

      to have a stranger’s warm body

      sleeping next to us.

       Part Two: The Feast

      We were never taught how to properly relate to the Indwelling World.

      None of us were,

      and now this world of modernistas isn’t even set up for it.

      So when longing shows up, all hell breaks loose.

      We become our own bull in our own china shop.

      It has become so ingrained

      to interpret longing-as-lack

      instead of the fullness that it is.

      And so, like cosmic clockwork,

      we assume the longing is empty

      instead of boundless and full

      rich and fertile

      ripe for the planting and eventual harvest.

      Like the poor fools in the Running of the Bulls

      who get trampled

      and are somehow shocked when they are,

      the human condition is one of endlessly running around

      trying to fill the longing

      with something…or someone.

      It cannot be done, and never will,

      as long as longing is seen through the eyes of poverty.

      The longing in the soul

      is the soul itself

      wanting to know

      the fullness of the soul itself.

      It isn’t empty any more than the darkness of space is.

      It is a doorway into a vast realm that has no edges, no bottom.

      It is an endless expanse

      and the solidity we take to be reality

      is formless and empty,

      and the emptiness contains

      an incomprehensible fullness.

      “It”

      —if we can even say that, for “it” is no-thing —

      includes the person on the bus beside you,

      the checkout girl in the grocery store,

      the man who delivered your mail;

      they all have a doorway

      to the same endless expanse within them too.

      And many of them are looking outside themselves

      for something or someone

      to fill the vast boundless longing

      they are feeling right alongside you.

      What is already inside this space

      within you, them, everyone

      is an energy —

      a life-giving

      life-bestowing

      life-sustaining fullness;

      but rather than bringing forth

      the abundant feast that is there,

      we go outward

      and onward

      hunting for scraps and crumbs instead.

      This longing is ancient and powerful and vast.

      It feels like it might even swallow you up

      if you chose to stay with it.

      Stay with it.

      Stay with it.

      If you do, it will lead you.

      And one day,

      maybe one day,

      you will cross paths with someone

      whose inner doorway reminds you of your own…

      But it will never truly happen

      if you

      don’t learn

      how to be

      alone.

      __

      To the tune of “Touch” / SOMA, Steve Roach + Robert Rich and “Ohroo” / The 10,000 Steps / Biomusique

      Walking Dao

      32.4659° N 90.0573° W

      (Yockanookany Trailhead, Natchez Trace, Mississippi)

      Walk a path enough times,

      it becomes as close to you

      as your own spine.

      The perfumed mist of valleys