Wrapped In Flesh

Armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan tree in the old graveyard and drive across the city like smoke. ~Arundhati Roy

I used to watch them from the backseat of the car on the way home from the office when we drove across the crumbling bridge burdened by belching busses held together by bailing wire and spit. They appeared at dusk over the river their large wings undulating to a rhythm sensed by their tiny, triangular ears.

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Sometimes, The End Is A Centipede

I go into a dark room looking for a record album and feel in my hand the wriggling form of a centipede who has chosen to sleep in the binding. ~Julio Cortázar

With my writing, I explore the dark rooms of my soul, those buried places visible briefly at the tail end of a blink but only in the instant the eyelids stick together and focus is blurred, a moment that might just as well be in the dead of a moonless night. In that unfocused blackness, a blind man is a better guide in my labyrinthian corridors than a sighted one for the blind man has learned to travel great distances bodily focused on the echoes ringing forth from eternity past to future unrevealed. It’s a type of echolocation.

A Sisyphean Legacy

I realized at once that in order to see you as I wanted to I would have to begin by shutting my eyes. ~Julio Cortázar

If I avoid the cruel mirror, I fall into reverie and see myself as a svelt hunk in the prime of my life ready to conquer the world in leaps and bounds with my guapo brilliance by accomplishing spectacular feats, bigly executed.

Scientific Mysticism

They sealed their oath drinking from the same earthenware bowl a mixture of rum, grave dirt, and rooster’s blood. ~Eduardo Galeano

The age of science extricated us from the miasmatic superstitious bindings of the past replacing them with equally fantastical fantasies. Case in point, science once believed the Neils Bohr declaration that an atom could be modeled as satellites spinning around a nucleus in perfectly spherical orbits. And the scientific community bowed down to the god of atomic structure.

Stopping The Madness

At the edge of madness, in the ecstasy where all is forever and all is never, they are gods. ~Eduardo Galeano

The US Government is on the edge of madness has been for decades, precariously perched on the razor edge of a Damascus blade and the blood of the American people is dripping on the cold steel of partisanship. We have become obsessed with right vs wrong, with winners and losers, to the point we have completely forgotten our kindergarten skills and lost the ability to play nice in the sandbox and find mutually acceptable solutions to vexing problems.

Real Friends Disagree

Opposition is true friendship. ~William Blake

I once had a friend tell me, “Hey D.O.“, she called me by my initials, “Hey D.O., If you were truly my friend you would always agree with me.” Of course, I immediately disagreed proving, in her mind, I was not a real friend. I disagreed not simply because I have a tendency to be contrarian. I disagreed because I believe a real friend will tell hard truths with empathy, with love, with the heart focused of helping a person become aware of the blind window in the Johari square, that which I am aware but the other is not.

The Infinite Bound By The Finite

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, infinite. ~William Blake

Cleansing the doors of perception requires grasping a razor knife and carefully sliding across the soul to remove the muck built up from a thousand million experiences blinding us to seeing with pure eyes, a million million thoughts sabotaging our vision with preconceived realities.