BEING THERE

So much time has passed and I am feeling a bit overwhelmed to still be here at this post. Actually, I have been away for some time, so returning is a bittersweet moment as I know that time away might have been posted here as the experiences of my journey. That time is past. But maybe I am here at last.

This could be among the last transmissions of my journey. Time has been flying by at a seemingly increasing pace. In recent days, I have been writing and posting new poems to Facebook every day. These Facebook Poems have collected as a daily publication since the end of December.  

So this is about friends this year, and how the project of writing a poem each day on Facebook has deepened my sense of the friends that share my life and my limited awareness of the wide range of activities going on with my friends. I have come to realize how much we take for granted in friendships, and how fragile they really are. Facebook can seduce you into believing your friendships are active, even intense. But it really is a substitute for actually BEING THERE. 

Time splashes through our fingers like water, intensely present but flowing past us. In an instant the moment is gone, lingering as the mere shadow of itself slowly decaying. Opportunities abound as an infinite array of possibilities, but only "Being There" shapes the reality of the moment, and we may never fully understand how rare true friendships really are. 

For me, those intense friendships are fading as the reality of now pushes our intimate contact with each other further away. I regret we cannot be fully present in the moment with each other, and that somehow, the intensity dwindles with the passage of Time.

But I am grateful for the combustion of our encounters and how they have created who I appear to be. I wonder if in the distant future that we imagine exists, we will meet again. Maybe this leg of the journey is to learn the meaning of BEING THERE. There was a film with Peter Sellers devoted to such an adventure and the superiority of experience over identity. But I think even that great film missed the mark in deepening our understanding of being in the moment.

 

The Twelve Songs of Christmas

Christmas is coming…I would like to celebrate it in the sensibility that has been my secret and secluded habitat… it has always been a time of reflection and renewal… I have always had two Renaissances: September and Winter Solstice.. a spiritual awareness and consciousness invades my Being…a Beingness becomes me and for a moment I am connected to the Entanglement…and I am everywhere and always for a slight sliver of Infinity…of foreverness…

Over the years, I have written Christmas/Solstice Songs to send to friends during the holidays. We found 12 of these songs that now have been arranged and collected into a Christmas Album: THE TWELVE SONGS OF CHRISTMAS.

A New Christmas

This Is A Season To Remember

Happy Yuletide, Lovers

Sing We Now

Maybe It Is Christmas

The Kind Of Christmas

The Season Of Our Dreams

Will You Be Home For Christmas

Solstice Song

Christmas Time

Merry Christmas To You

Another Year

As I indicated earlier, every winter solstice has always served as an artistic renaissance for me. Sparking this renaissance this year has been the genius of creative arranger and producer Rainer Raisch, his marvelous studio, his Dreamland Orchestra and Singers, and the warmth and presence of the soloist Marie Luise Lutz. Raisch manages to uncover musical motifs specific to each song and expand them, so they unfold as a tapestry of musical expression.

Enabling this process has been my friend and colleague, Dr. Ulrich Hartung, who has encouraged and supported my work for many years, and was responsible for connecting me with Rainer Raisch.

We will soon release the songs on streaming services, for each of the twelve days of Christmas, and then as an Album.

DIMENSIONS OF DIMINISHMENT

Time to take a moment to reflect on aspects of mortality that I haven't considered before. I am already exceeding the lifespan of male members of my family going back a century or so. For the past few years I have found myself focused on the moment, and have found energy to extend these moments by noticing and creating objects of awareness that vivify Being in Time. This somehow seems remotely connected to Martin Heiddeger's opus magnum, Being and Time and a later final lecture, Time and Being.

But my reflection encounters a different arena, one that counters an expanding universe with its opposite process, a diminishing content that tugs at at the heartstrings of a universe seemingly out of control and plunging recklessly into an infinite abyss.

My perception might be that of peering through a glass darkly at infinite regression, a diminishment, if you will. Well, a diminishment, even if you won't. It is perhaps a little like the "incredible shrinking man," but has more to do with the mass of intelligence, which seemed immeasurable when I last thought about it. But as I looked at the implications of the entanglement overcoming infinity, I began to understand that it is all quantifiable to an infinite degree, and the nature of infinity is that it is complete+...complete-.

So I seem to be on the brink of Diminishment... which has the look of disappearing, until you realize Diminishment is Infinite, and I only appear to be disappearing. We are the infinite reflections of the jewel of diminishment... cultures have expressed these jewels as mandala. Maybe I'm becoming a Mandala, a singing of myself as a jewel spinning like a comet across the night sky.