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Bali Poems � travel unravels me

world keeps turning flames keep burning my mind an inferno infernal internal combustion distrusting its own occasional urges surges of powerful yearning im learning still to unwind the twining improve my timing (which might explain the rhyming) combining rhythm and sound as i continue to ground astounding how high the sky seems how unreachable dreams seem not every kingdom needs a queen not every projection needs a screen sometimes i just want to scream silent and loud drown it all out the incessant self loathing who even cares about clothing anyways? but then i take a deep breath or two expand into the blue of the sky and the sea where there's no you and no me just a field of intention where we can heal any wrench in the works or the gut any patterns and ruts i could drive myself nuts but instead i crack open farther this is the hard part i talk to the trees i let bugs bite my knees offer blood offer tears offer sweat offer years of my life to whatever is worthy (trying not to catch scurvy) just me open palmed raise a glass drop the balm kiss my ass right or wrong i am here i am free i am clear i am she who eats fruit kinda wild kinda cute in my awkward human suit recruiting for the crucial crusade the renegade parade the earnest charade wouldn't trade it for anything not one breath not one step not one kept secret unveiled not one tear's salty trail...

� ashes and seeds

ubud, bali

I am born with the light into a world i can not remember dreaming.
I rise with the day inside an unfamiliar song.
I am inside a body, inside a family, inside a world.
I ask for nothing, yet receive so much, my palms overflowing with salt and flowers, ash and fruit.
An electric buzz of insects rises steep from the density of green that surrounds me and just as quickly fades away.

I am still here.

Shadows play upon leaf tops, beloveds intertwine beneath, the river charges towards and away, life is so undeniably real.
I would dissolve into an offering of smoke and song if it didn't seem so true that I am more of use in solid form, dissolving hard knots of human story into another sort of offering.

I am still here.
Even as Death catches me from behind and sweeps me across a grand dancefloor of cracked bones and burnt hair, even as i stare into the empty sockets of everyone's final lover, even as a red river runs in rivulets over my skin--that skin is warm, and holds a quickening within it.
I am still here.

Even as the solid forms of a known world dissolve in the flames of the funeral pyre, somehow I am still here.
And so are you, beloved opal keeper, feather finder, nectar seeker.
You are all around me even as you are gone you are not gone.
Even as I feel myself dissolving I am still here.

I hold a rose quartz skull in my right hand and a golden serpent in my left. The ochre of a homeland I do not posses spirals across my palms. The fire is being built, the songs are being sung, somewhere in the world there is a blade stained with innocent blood. Somewhere in the world are the hands that wield it.

Each pair of hands holds different work--mining the opals, sifting the bones, painting the ochre, ringing the bell, fanning the flame
but the hands that wield the knife--how is that work given?
How is that work placed sacred into a human vessel to wreak its havoc upon our world?

It is not for understanding.

Bring me those hands and I swear I will wash the blood from them.
I will offer myself to the resolution of this pain.
If such a thing can be called into the world, I will raise my voice in supple power to create a song of truth triumphant and justice compassionate.
I will drink the salty labor of forgiveness until the water runs clear.

And if those hands never come to me for washing, somehow I will remain.
Somehow each day will still rise through me into dreaming.

� life inside love affairs

rainy season, bali

Once again waking into a day overflowing with water, a day filled to bursting with rhythm and sound. Something in the world must need this, something larger than the human story something with a capability to contain vastness.

Into this vastness I place my small offerings of words and seed and efforts of attention in some awkward attempt to shape that vastness into another day of breath and joy.

The space folds in around my offerings and somehow another day emerges from its shaping as it coalesces into rain and dirt and the song they sing each time they kiss.

They are the oldest lovers, the rain and the dirt. Surpassed only by the ocean and the moon. These ancient love affairs we live inside of they hold secrets for our own.

When you are the ocean when the true depth of your vastness reflects your lover's shining brilliance, an illuminated pathway is formed from the borderland of our world into the limitless potential of the horizon.

When you are the dirt when you can absorb the incessant rhythms of your lover's true patterns of being into your own body and use the resulting fertility to feed your own, then the world is continually born anew through your love.

then your love itself is a worthy offering.
what else would you have it be?

And what if you are the moon and all you know to do it reflect the light of one distant source onto another? Then you allow the innate cycles of your deepest shining to pull upon your love, bringing you into a dance that spans the space between you and gives shape and elegance and pattern to the daily life of all you touch.

And what if you are the rain forever falling, and forever rising back out of the embrace of your love, only to fall back in once again? Then you offer yourself fully to that revolution, giving your body completely to the patterns of transformation that through your fluidity, nourish the growth of the world...

Bali Poems � trees for the forest

At any moment your hand might unfold me into the full possibility of your own uprising. At any moment our eyes might open into each other and one can be the crashing wave and one can be the shore and then -blink- we switch, as the jagged edges of our young shorelines are gradually softened into the arch and curve of a landscape undisturbed by its own impermanence. At any moment the rains might come and drench our fierceness for a quiet rushing moment and ten thousand thousand tiny pounding blessings might explode against our skin, tenderizing the meat of these awkward exquisite animal forms we are momentarily trapped within. At any moment the seething winds might spiral undeniably around us stealing our breath to feed its own shaping and you and I, breathless, might surrender these bodies to the storm and rise inside its eye towards something other than this separation that contains us. At any moment words might fail me. As they do when the space between us disappears as the equation of possibility collapses to zero and pressed together within the singularity, the space where words might live is only one breath we share and the chasm that we usually stare at each other across is suddenly filled in on itself and at any moment we might cease resisting. At any moment time might unwind our tension's ticking and the muscles of our determination might release into wings. This now, this now that is not quite yet, I ponder it between my fingers, wondering whether or not to call it into being. At any moment I might impregnate myself with your elusive laughter and incubate the impossibility of our happiness inside myself, growing larger with the secret of what we dare not speak aloud. At any moment you might fill me with your emptiness as I might eat your hunger as you might drink my thirst as we might dance each others stillness, invisible to any eye. And at any moment we might turn away, we might remember the availability of forgetfulness, we might turn this page and clear the air and allow the world to come rushing back between us. But across the chasm, your eyes' depth reaches me still, as my fingers caress the possibility of moments yet to be.

� travel unravels me

seminyak, bali

world keeps turning flames keep burning my mind an inferno infernal internal combustion distrusting its own occasional urges surges of powerful yearning im learning still to unwind the intertwining improve my timing (and yet i find myself rhyming) combining rhythm and sound as i continue to ground astounding how high the sky seems how unreachable dreams seem not every kingdom needs a queen not every projection needs a screen sometimes i just want to scream silent and loud drown it all out the incessant self loathing who even cares about clothing anyways?
but
then
i
take
a
deep
breath
or
two
expand into the blue of the sky and the sea where there's no you and no me just a field of intention where we can heal any wrench in the works or the gut any patterns and ruts i could drive myself nuts but instead i crack open farther this is the hard part i talk to the trees i let bugs bite my knees offer blood offer tears offer sweat offer years of my life to whatever is worthy (trying not to catch scurvy) just me open palmed raise a glass drop the balm kiss my ass right or wrong i am here i am free i am clear i am she who eats fruit kinda wild kinda cute in my awkward human suit recruiting for the crucial crusade the renegade parade the earnest charade wouldn't trade it for anything not one breath not one step not one kept secret unveiled not one tear's salty trail...

� serpent path symbiosis

san francisco

landing at home after the final festival of the season... what a cycle it has been!

Just wanting to take a moment to offer my profound gratitude and inspiration for the work that was done on behalf of ourselves and the collective during the Serpent Path ritual workshop (and the Equinox prayerformance) at Symbiosis this past weekend.

With the challenge and blessing of a thunderstorm right at the beginning of the workshop, hectic transition to an indoor space (thanks to La, Lynx and Maze for sharing their time and space with us!) there were over 80 shining faces so present for the entire process.

As soon as we began, I felt the palpable energy and attention of everyone present, the air was electric with intention and magic. I have rarely been privaleged to participate in such a focused and potent collective ritual.

This work is one of the most important things in my life right now, and Isis and I are continuing to cultivate and build off of what we have been working on for the last several years.

For those of you who are interested, I have started a tribe as a way to stay informed, to continue communicating about this work and to participate from wherever you might be: tribes.tribe.net/serpentpath

again, our deepest gratitude and blessings for this work, this community and this life.

� synergenesis hiatus

live and direct from the orchard

greetings familia and visionary culture crafters galore...

as you may have heard through the whisperweb by now, Synergenesis is not happening this year.
its a big deal for me and for many others too.
its time to take a step back, asess the situation and see what comes through.
it feels clear that memes are shifting, that channels are morphing, and as a visionary culture crafter myself, i feel the urge to continue evolving, not sticking to the same routine, but pushing levles of interactivity, of collaboration, of what visionary can actually mean.

so we're taking a break, shifting the scope.

i would like to offer my profound gratitude to all of the amazing people who have supported and participated in the unfolding that Synergenesis has been these last 3 years, especially to Trichter, Delvin, Sijay and Isis for your above and beyond levels of interactivation. The process of producing these events has taught me so much, particularly about what is possible when a project is truly undertaken as an offering, and how abundance and inspiration flow like water into wine from open palms.

There is another event in the works for early November, an entirely unforseen experiment in collective reality crafting and realtime mythmapping. Many of you are familiar with the work I have been doing for years on liminality, and this event will be a culmination point of much of that work. Highly interactive, dissolving all boundaries between life and art, audience and performer, work and play, prayer and joke, song and map.

keep your inner ears tuned for sendings from the space between...

between here and there
we will meet in mid air
in order to learn how to fly

love like water
(fluid and undeniable)
eve LadyApples

� mama sang

san francisco

what if sacred prostitute was the misinterpretation of several shortsighted misguided over confident insecure old men who hadn't taken a moment to praise the mother in a long long time centuries of culture

what if we lived in service to she who flowed through us
offering up the nectar to anyone
smart enough to notice
and touch the earth in reverence
and devote what ever art form they chose to turn their lives into
to the propigation of her memery

mammery glands
upturned hands
intricate strands of lighweaving artisans
non-partisan alliance
of heros and fools
makers and breakers of rules
zen sand rakers
undertakers and those who move through their hands
after having said good bye to this life
hello to the next