Come Outside

                                     Come Outside        Jan 26-27  2008

Sit still
And say everything to me
With a quiet eye.

Wild is
The voice of breathing, or
The voice of heartbeat, or
The voice of deep dreaming awake
It is there
Breathing forests and seas, pulsing waterways and planets
The ancient language is looking back at us
Reading our posture
Sinking into our intention
Smelling our core.
                    **************

Sometimes, you disappear by accident.
Once, I disappeared on a boulder.
My legs turned to stone.  My chest became the air.  My eye became sky.
And I was gone.
And I was there.
Stone, and air, and warm sun, and sky
It is conscious.  (If it is not, then what are we?)
It is. 
All suffused with light and the sound of life.

I was too inexperienced.  That infinity scared me then--
(Although my quest began)
I fell apart under the impassive dare
And got up and returned to my form
Went back down the hill to the dorm
To the familiar cell.
                    *************

In familiar places; 
In the well-defined places,
People have everything so pictured

God forbade it
But they picture Him, too, making Him old and grey
Or mean
Or peculiar
Or Santa Claus
Or Obsolete
People-pictures in their own eyes

But when I come suddenly face to face
I spill down undone; flesh to dust to updraft to stardust sprinkled in space Face
I am
Deep asleep and widely conscious
While the ancient language stirs me
Like a flock of birds, shoal shifting through the air
Dissolving my core into threads of beads.... strands of code...waves and particles
A wild thing; A great, huge
Wild Thing
And not what you picture.
                    *************

All this wild which we have worked so hard to reconfigure
It is the imprint of the huge hand of God
Not subject to the images of men.
In fact
All this huge expanding cosmos is a body we live within
The face of which is outside our imagination.

So I sit still breathing and the birds forget me, and sing their chit chat
I walk mossy orbits through galaxies of wood and the deer don’t care
Winged kin waft up on thermals over mountain cliffs
I groan,
Because.
The trees groan, because.

A time comes
We give our shells away to nurse the dust
And, not needing to be anymore
Inside
We waft up to meet the Very Face