THE CLEARING

I have been away for some time. But I have been on a voyage of discovery, a time of recovery, and now I am pausing in a clearing where everything is new. 

I look around at the terrain. I am always cognizant of my terrain as it defines the journey. This terrain is jagged, with giant mountains, deep valleys, and treacherous trails. I struggle to travel a few years, and I must rest. Hidden in these mountains are ancient monasteries with inhabitants who have lived for ages articulating and demonstrating the Truth of Being. 

My existence is so temporal, caught in the web of confusion, of the Maya, of the illusion that diverts us from tending to the reality of ourselves. It is a trap that most of us struggle against, a reality that is oppressive and pessimistic. We are pushed to extremes to the point that we can only focus on trivial minutiae. I have to admit I have been diverted by the illusion, despite my understanding of the Maya as a trap. 

But why? Somewhere in the vast conscious awareness, we are the reality of Here and Now. It is right here, seemingly within (although inner and outer are just binary constructs). 

But here in The Clearing I have discovered that Silence is an infinite domain of discovery. Everything comes from the Silence, in the quietness of our Being Time itself is being created filled with infinite imaginings that will never end.

The Clearing is a node of Infinity where in a infinite pause, becoming is a perpetual delight.

BEING HERE

I have been so delinquent from this site, even though I have been writing in multiple media. I have been writing a new poem everyday for Facebook, and have committed to complete this year with an original work each day. The first six months of Facebook poems have been collected into a volume that should be published in the next few weeks. 

I am committed to finishing my manuscripts of New York short-short stories by September, even though the last two stories have been extremely challenging. Mulberry Days is a work based on an experience of living on Mulberry Street in the context of rich history of that famous street. I am happy to say that book should be available in the next few weeks.

My long awaited phenomenological experiment Making Music has been set and should be available sometime this Fall. A project which is still in a speculation stage is a souvenir book for IMPACT with pictures and text on the experimental workshop in collaboration conducted at New York University for ten years.

This is a challenging time for me. For some reason, ideas have been streaking through my mind like comets, representing the culmination of years of exploration and research. I have been fortunate to have an excellent book designer, Oksana Tykha, who has piloted my two poetry manuscripts, Tilting Time and Remnants of Being, into books available on Amazon.

In the meantime, I have been listening deeply to the music makers of the American Song, especially Neil Diamond and Carly Simon. This has awakened my musical wandering, and I have no idea where this may take me.

My first tendency has been to focus on "Being There" as a mode of of awareness. But I can see how a shift to "Being Here" provokes a new dimension of exploration. This shift promises a new artistic energy that may uncover new works and new directions.

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.