Notes for the Road

 

To find yourself you must lose yourself.
The One you are seeking is not inside you.
You are inside the One.

To be present in every time
you must be here, now.
Now is the center of all times.

Here, now, you can step on and off
the trains to past and future
and travel on parallel lines.

To get to a place you do not know
you must go by a way you do not know.
Burn your maps to make beacons.

To wake up, you must dream.
Without dreams, you are a sleepwalker
who could join the ranks of the living dead.

There will be monsters, of course,
dark dwellers at every new threshold.
Without them, how could you be ready to pass?

In dealing with demons, you must learn
to choose the forms of your worst fears
and laugh at your creations.

If you wish to see marvels around you
you must carry marvels within.
A mirror can't show you what you don't bring.

The gates of the Otherworld open
from wherever you are. Don’t think
you have to drink jungle juice with anacondas.

Put your blade away, dragonslayer.
You only conquer the dragon when you raise it
and ride it and turn its energy towards Light.

Turn out the lights if you want to find the Light.
The visible is the skin of the invisible.
In the dark, it is easier to see with inner eyes.

Don’t list the Trickster among your demons.
He is your friend if you expect the unexpected
Everything interesting happens on the boundaries.

If you want to be fully alive, be ready to die.
How about now? You feel the cool breath
of Death on your neck. Give him some foreplay.

To find the One, don't spurn the many
Name only one God, and you’ll always end up with two.
Seek the nameless behind the forest of names.

Make your confessions on the road
not from behind a curtain. The hawk will hear you
and the rabbit, the lily and the stone.

Walk on the mythic edge. Let your life
become a stage for divine events.
Notice what neverending story is playing through you.

Look after your poetic health.
Notice what rhymes in a day, and a life.
Follow the logic of resemblances.

Practice real magic: Follow the passions of your soul
and bring gifts from the Otherworld into this one.
You’ll regret what you left undone –

the fence you wouldn’t jump, the dream you didn’t follow –
more than anything you did when your cool lover
stops licking your neck and takes you in his full embrace.

- My poem is included in Growing Big Dreams by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: "Path in Transylvania" by RM

Notes for the Road

To find yourself you must lose yourself.
The One you are seeking is not inside you.
You are inside the One.

To be present in every time
you must be here, now.
Now is the center of all times.

Here, now, you can step on and off
the trains to past and future
and travel on parallel lines.

To get to a place you do not know
you must go by a way you do not know.
Burn your maps to make beacons.

To wake up, you must dream.
Without dreams, you are a sleepwalker
who could join the ranks of the living dead.

There will be monsters, of course,
dark dwellers at every new threshold.
Without them, how could you be ready to pass?

In dealing with demons, you must learn
to choose the forms of your worst fears
and laugh at your creations.

If you wish to see marvels around you
you must carry marvels within.
A mirror can't show you what you don't bring.

The gates of the Otherworld open
from wherever you are. Don’t think
you have to drink jungle juice with anacondas.

Put your blade away, dragonslayer.
You only conquer the dragon when you raise it
and ride it and turn its energy towards Light.

Turn out the lights if you want to find the Light.
The visible is the skin of the invisible.
In the dark, it is easier to see with inner eyes.

Don’t list the Trickster among your demons.
He is your friend if you expect the unexpected
Everything interesting happens on the boundaries.

If you want to be fully alive, be ready to die.
How about now? You feel the cool breath
of Death on your neck. Give him some foreplay.

To find the One, don't spurn the many
Name only one God, and you’ll always end up with two.
Seek the nameless behind the forest of names.

Make your confessions on the road
not from behind a curtain. The hawk will hear you
and the rabbit, the lily and the stone.

Walk on the mythic edge. Let your life
become a stage for divine events.
Notice what neverending story is playing through you.

Look after your poetic health.

Notice what rhymes in a day, and a life.
Follow the logic of resemblances.

Practice real magic: Follow the passions of your soul
and bring gifts from the Otherworld into this one.
You’ll regret what you left undone –

the fence you wouldn’t jump, the dream you didn’t follow –
more than anything you did when your cool lover
stops licking your neck and takes you in his full embrace.

Photo: Path in Transylvania (c) Robert Moss

Amsterdam rhymes

1. I hear from the airline that the middle flight in my three-part journey to Bucharest, starting tomorrow [Sept 29], has been cancelled. That flight was supposed to take me from Atlanta to Paris-Charles de Gaulle.

2. I have not been re-booked so I call an agent. The wait is long.

3. To pass time, I open my Facebook messages and find that a friend has sent me a link to a poem by David Whyte, “What to Remember When Waking”.  The poem counsels us to bring memories of a deeper world into this one and to recognize how the ego’s plans may be trumped by a deeper plan:

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

4. I love the poem, but I have read it many times and at least a dozen people have sent me links in the past. So I am in no haste to re-read it. However, I am struck by the graphic, a beautiful black-and-white photo of a canal in Amsterdam, apparently taken by the poet himself this month. I tell my Facebook friend, "I will look for an Amsterdam connection today."

5. The music on the phone stops. I have a human being on the phone, a very nice one, as it turns out, with a promising name: Angela. I tell her my situation and suggest we might want to look at rebooking my whole itinerary.

6. In about one minute, she has done the trick. My whole itinerary has been changed. The middle flight now takes me from Detroit to....AMSTERDAM.

There really is a logic of resemblances in life, and (as I was again reminded) we need to be in a state of good poetic health to read it and apply it.

The moment I wrote and posted this short narrative I received notification that I have been upgraded to First class for the first leg of the new itinerary. This stuff works.

Photo © David Whyte 
Brouwersghract, 
Early Morning Amsterdam September 2014

The Sidewalk Book of Changes

Walking east with my dog on a city street in the early light, I pause to inspect some business cards spilled on the sidewalk. There is the logo of the ABC News network, and the name of a local anchor; I recognize her name because I recently saw her on TV. What's the message for the day? A news theme, perhaps.
    I am struck by the number of spilled cards: six. That is the number of lines in a hexagram of the I Ching, the Book of Changes. 
    Can I read the pattern of these cards like a hexagram delivered by the oracle of the world? A crazy idea, perhaps, but not altogether crazy, since the cards on the sidewalk form a distinct pattern: four up, two down. If I read the cards that are face down as yin or "belly" lines, and the the ones that are face up as yang lines, I have a pattern that is easy to recognize.
    It is the repetition of the trigram Li, or Fire, producing hexagram 30 in the sequence of the I Ching, which is itself called Li, Fire or Radiance, but also The Clinging. Whether I look at the pattern while facing east, which is how I first saw it, or facing west - as I saw it later, walking back from the park - the arrangement is the same. Fire above Fire. "That which is bright rises twice."

    At home, I pull out my personal workbook on the I Ching. This is a collection of the notes, commentaries and readings I've assembled over the years, rich in illustrations. It came fully together in the year when I taught a class on I Ching for Dreamers. We worked back into the primal, shamanic level of the Chinese oracle, drumming the patterns of the changing lines, watching like hawks to see what followed from each casting, and adjusting our associations with each phase of the Changes according to what the world revealed after it appeared.
    Themes suggested by the hexagram Li, I noted, include


Enlightenment. Shedding light on things. Sunny day. Brightness. Need to understand synergy and interdependence; fire has no definite form but "clings" to its fuel.

     I look again at the Chinese ideogram for Li. There are two figures. The one on the right is called zhui and may be seen as a golden bird, a bird with sun-bright feathers. The figure on the left is more mysterious, and - for traditional Chinese readers of the oracle - is sometimes seen as ominous. It could be a very ancient bird or animal, or a demon; it could be holding a net to catch the sun bird.
    All in all, I like Fire as a pattern for today. Yet I remember that tomorrow I am traveling to Boulder, where fire has not been a pleasant theme in recent weeks. A "net" to contain a fire could be good.
    Every morning in the city, I am alert for a fresh message from the Sidewalk Oracle. I'll watch to see what happens next, since the oracle spoke in the language of the Book of Changes. It's fun reading what turns up in everyday life - in the woods or in a gritty urban neighborhood - as a language of signs and symbols. Playing games like the one I've just played here is a way of growing the power to notice what rhymes in a day; it helps maintain what Baudelaire described, with a poet's clarity, as a necessary state of "poetic health".