"Let Myself be Aware"

let myself be aware in this moment that i do not need to be aware
in order for everything to operate functionally, i am
part of all that is, in form or not. may my thoughts not impede
the progress of the circuit being completed through me,
an ark being constructed, in preparation for some preconceived
Global Flood of consciousness. infuse me, o nameless, o many names,
o collective and singular being(s) (am i praying to the billions of cycling
cells, phasing through receptors, transmitting photons, wiggling strands of pseudo-quantified DNA?)
infuse me with the energy that I Am, that Eye Am, We are, expressing solidarity through symbiosis,
a unity of purpose as all organisms contained herein, in whatever we are-at, to construct a new earth, what seems to be
the real "new world order,"

Are there such things, "anymore," as "too arrogant," and "too humble"?

Each cell screams, "hallelujah!," and how can I deny it?

A feeling, expressed or unexpressed: Suspend an awareness that has been recently popping into myself that....

ode to creation

new nameless created thing, thus naming you i dedicate this to you to be and to have fun with your other names in a not-so-distant game where you can go back and forth, in any directions, in your dream, creating new ones, and know that you were somehow connected to me. although you may forget who or what i am, you will nevertheless always have me in you, and you will jump, or do whatever you do, when you experience the light for your first time, and you will slowly remember me and love yourself as a result, or perhaps i will be entirely surprised.

illumination

something happening with neptune that i don't know about, yet some new-agey philanthropist shouts this at me because people in touch are supposed to know these things, and my mind, though unable to send a verbal message to my mouth, is pouring into the canyon in my chest, and i wonder what negative black space, what satanic metaphor, is holding me down, still, after all these years, and, nails thick, pressing into my skin like bamboo torture, and out of breath for doing nothing, i flip open to a page of blake's illuminations and wonder at what point jerusalem's restoration was inevitable, if it was in yahweh's stars, or if that city could have ended when it wasn't on the map, snuffed out by all the world.

roasted mozzerella

while walking at night on alberta, we imagine what we might do tonight. do you drink, she says, and says, i don't, and i say i like wine, and then we find ourselves paused under a sign of a closed wine merchant. later, i remember the other day in whole foods. a clank stops the crowd, an event i, while sampling what i think was called roasted mozzerella, but is actually just some herbed pasta, witness right in front of me: a young woman, serene and bright, replaces a bottle of wine from the tile floor. that's a ton of good luck right there, when you drop a wine bottle and it doesn't break, the clerk says. and i leave the store without buying anything.

want is need

someone is squeezing the hose, you become aware of it in your heart, and constricted, you cannot take it. that's physics, it says, the physics of water, and it has to flow, and that green wall, plastic and opaque, will not hold me back for long.

an ark key

more than a clever pun, it comes into me, and i never do anything with it but say it a few times, liking its associations. it makes a good store name, you say, or maybe a book. it seems like it should be a book of verse, if should exists, in an indie shop. then, one day down the road, you decide (you think randomly) to walk into a zine shop on the haight when you are thinking of the arc concept, and there on the shelf is an anthropology of anarchy-inspired poetry called, An Ark Key.

seams

2. crafting the cut of the artery river, streaming in high definition white noise,
like a butter knife slipping through the grand canyon.

1. the undercurrent spiral-dances, dividing the waters from the waters, and you, the artist, ask me to ask you about any of your works, giving you a way in, because each, you say, has a genesis.

4. this one, you say, is your favorite. it looks like scribble, like any elephant with a brush could do it, with layers of multicolored verticals and horizontals, thick and thin, like a broken television still-frame, on mute, chaotic and scratchy, thick and thin, and i ask if it has a name, and it begins to look better when you say, time.

spirals of laughter respire through heaps of overflowing salamander gills while
arcs of colorized upside-down cameos knot together, into olive vines, not
unlike the herbal rewards you read on a stash tea tab gracing the front of your journal that through free-association, comes
as you pass a green metal fence over an interstate overpass and the sign
that tells you where you may want to go. we are everywhere,

you say that it says, and this is space. it appears as nothing,
but you feel full. this is human, you say. and time is your perception,
just perception. and that is all,

like time. concentric circles pick up with the wind, conforming to the geometry
of your brittle cheek bone and knee skin, and paradoxically penetrating the seams

of your microfiber knit pants. you pick up a leaf in the shape of a bat
and we animate it, making its wings flap. it's a toy, you say, knowing the god that
has penetrated all microfibers. and it's free, the toy, and sustainable, made from one-hundred percent recycled organic fibers.

are we in a vortex, you say, and we receive an answer: yes, and it is free. this is what it is. and we are children.

blue heron

for the first time, i am sleeping alone in the middle of the city (under a plot of trees on a soft dry bed of pine needles), in a mummy-style sleeping bag that's camouflage in the shade of the towering firs above me--and i feel free. . . .i can sleep in, without having to worry about anyone checking on me, and i know i have everything provided for me. in my cocoon under the trees, with cars zipping by in their busy trapped lives, i feel like a little animal looking up out of my hole when i awaken.

today, i awoke to a gray sky, and after meditating on my breath for awhile, i put on my pants and shoes, tied up my sleeping bag, and as i was about to climb over the wall that separates my little forest home from civilization, i found a polished black stone on the bed of dead tree needles. so i pocketed it, seeing it as a gift from the universe whose purpose will most likely become apparent in time.

a little later, i went to powell's to continue reading The Alchemist. in the passage i read today, the old king figure tells the boy hero, the shepherd Santiago to follow the omens that the universe leaves, which will lead him to his destiny, and gives him two stones: one black, which means, "yes," and the other white, which means, "no," and the man instructs the boy to ask objective questions along his path, and the stones will help him read omens that are laid out. just then a butterfly appears, and the boy takes it to be a good omen, and the man nods, sensing the boy's thought.

my adventure is taking a different turn. did i mention i was ordered to stay off psu's campus? remember that day when i was telling you about my bat totem, and we discovered a new path together, at the end of which was the vista bridge on which my story started? then, the next day, on my way to ben's, i decided to follow some runners, instead of taking the usual path, and i discovered an easier path, and some different insights. i started realizing that the universe is guiding me out of a rut, into new exciting territory. so when events led up to receiving a citation banishing me from psu which has been my territory for 2 years, it was kind of a shock, but also not quite a surprise. i am literally being forced to change paths.

i, too, am being called to the SE. the other day, in fact, i stayed with my friend brandon who lives off belmont. while he showered, i walked to get a bite to eat, leisurely meandering, feeling connected, looking for signs. a small asian man dressed in an orange robe struck my attention. he was holding orange leaves behind him, and stepping carefully, mindfully, emanating peace. so i decided, on a whim (whimsical as i am) to follow him (i thought he might be a monk). then a free box called to my attention, to my right. an empty beer box was there, BLUE HERON brand, so as I squatted down and ripped off the cardboard emblem, the monk ahead of me turned around and stopped, smiling, curious. he seemed to be watching a black dog across the street, and i asked him if this was his dog. he muttered something (it seems he didn't speak English), which i thought was, "yes." i showed him what i had found, and said the blue heron is a symbol. it means, "clues dropped from the universe" (my shaman guide teddy just a couple days before had drawn the blue heron card for me in his animal spirit deck). the monk repeated, smiling as if amused, "clues," and continued on his path. when i got up and continued in his direction, the monk was gone, and looking for him, i realized i was standing by the Dharma Center, complete with a zendo and free zen meditations (which i had been wanting to find). later on, when i got to new seasons to eat, i overheard an old man, distinguished in appearance, and an older woman excitedly talking about the universe's mysteries revealed. they were seated under a piece of art that was like something i had made before when i was connected. it simply said, "HEAVEN," in blue crudely painted letters on a white background. i had been wondering earlier in the day if i should try making some money at making art, and this was reassuring. well, after observing the couple talking, and thinking, after seeing all the clues, i should take the initiative and go up to them, i did. the man was a little rude, since i had intruded on their conversation, and i apologized, and said they were a manifestation in my reality, and he said, "here, this is for you," and handed me a small booklet. i asked him if his contact info. is in here, and he said, "yes." the booklet talks about how synchronicities in this new reality are the norm, and contains a 13 moon calendar, based on the mayan tzolkin. the booklet is put out by an organization i had never heard of before, based in ashland, oregon, called "the foundation of the law of time."

i just keep on going, having faith. it is hard, and there are many unknowns, and i am faced with the weakness of my mortality and meager existence every day, but, fearless, i am following my destiny.

Gnarled into the shape of salty storms

I just got back in Portland yesterday afternoon after a week sleeping in a tent with Zachery in his parents' backyard, where I felt like an imposition around his family (although they assured me I was welcome, after Zachery talked to them about my concerns), and this stress on me, although somewhat difficult, was a welcomed change. The equinox and seasonal shift was already switching me into hibernation mode, making me want to focus on preparing a room for myself where I can create.

I was forced to confront certain conflicts I have been avoiding within my own self, paralleled by the roar of the ocean at night in a cold dripping wet tent and lonely walks on the barren and cold beach and through rugged and winding wilderness paths where bears come out at night, with trees that look like bonzais, gnarled into the shape of salty storms. I had been half-expecting these conflicts, or conflict, to surface, especially since the previous week at Wolf Creek. These environments, though, if harsh, have been tempered by a steady wave of love, and I see it all as pure blessing.

love bats into the enormous night, you cave in.

On the way down to Round Spring, an ancient site in the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri yesterday afternoon, I wanted my shamanic initiation to be validated somehow for my mom. I reminded her of my memory of the bat I saw as soon as I arrived in Portland in 2006, at the very corner where, little did I know at the time, lived a person who called himself Dark River, who would introduce me to a sacred plot of land in southern Oregon where I would meet other shamans and continue journeying with them. I told my mom that the bat is a symbol of a shamanic death, similar to a baptism: an initiation into a new life. It is also a symbol of love, I told her, of energy.

When we arrived into the campground that my mom wanted to take me to, there was a sign that said, "Ampitheater. Slide Show Tonight at 8:30." A poster outside the restrooms next to our site indicated that the topic could be anything. So we decided we would attend. "What else are we going to do," I said. "It's not like we have T.V." Mom said. We had three hours until the show.

After setting up the tent, I fell asleep reading from the book Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson, a book Dark River recently gave me as a gift. I awoke, knowing I was just in time for the show. Just to be sure, I asked my mom what time it was. Eight o'clock.

By the time we walked down the road to the ampitheater, the forest was dark, and the trees were alive with the rhythm of the cicadas. The friendly female park ranger announced that the slide show presentation was on bats, demystified. Many stereotypes which normally give bats a bad reputation were replaced with the truth. For example, contrary to popular belief, bats are not blind, they do not typically have or spread rabies, and if they can detect from far off a minnow's fin two centimeters above the surface of the water, they will not fly into your hair, girls! Some of these debunked myths obviously were meant to be a little ridiculous.

One, however, really caught my attention. There was a photo of a bat who was protecting another bat (who had a broken wing), with its own wing. The ranger asked, "What do you call it when one person sacrifices itself for another?" It was obvious to me, a message: "Love?" I said.

I received information on how to build a bat house, and we were told to respect any signs we saw outside caves that indicated they were closed, since there is a disease affecting the bats, a white fungus that seems to be a growing epidemic in the North East U.S., and we think humans are the carriers. The Round Spring Cavern, there in the campground, was closed, "due to bat gate construction."

666th Avenue

7/12/09

concerns. . . .i may lose this. Oh,well. The universe has been making me accustomed to loss. These things do not define me. My security is shifting to the formless, the divine, knowing that the more i give, the more i receive. This is a law of the universe. And “oh, well” in this silly world has become a statement, like “so.” In the “back of my mind” rests vague things that once were perceived by my senses, memories. Dark/River/Adam, an ever-changing being. Why is he in my life? Why am I in his? These are questions I seem to be asking more often lately with everyone I meet, everyone that disappears. Why did they disappear? There's a moving force, writing the story. After we get back from Sauvie's Island, River quotes an idea or two out of many I had put out there that seemed brilliant at the time: calling our house Sex Sixth Avenue because I merged things overheard, Sax Fifth Avenue. And I forget if this is my idea or someone else's. After it's here, does it matter how it arrived? And my name, Jory Lynntern. I merge things. And the night before: I ended up wandering with Jon, meeting him for the first time, though strangely, these people are seeming familiar. We all seem to have similar thoughts on the nature of reality. River/Adam asks me to recall some of the other creative ideas I had. I shrug, at a loss. “Into the ether?” he says. That thought scares me, but yes, and it resonates. I think that's why things scare me, because they resonate, and it's a shock that it resonates, because it seems it shouldn't. Everything seems to be dissolving as soon as it's discovered, becoming something new.

And i awaken with fading dream memories (is not dream-stuff the same as memory, and is there not more, or just as much, lived when asleep than when awake?) I just need to hold still, to relax. This is what ben, my guardian angel, has been saying to me. And i think this morning, reflecting as dream faded and coming into this ordinary reality, an illusion of constants, that perhaps i am a bodhisattva. Because i remember laughing hysterically at a jest, something done to entertain me. And i remember brandon suggesting i'm a buddha, that i do no wrong, that i have immense compassion and wisdom, that this is all i do, while the universe takes care of all my needs, and people feed, clothe, and entertain me. My sister and i came up with stuff we knew was unlike anything done before, and we would have had instant success had we cast ourselves into the world. Now it's all into the ether. Even my sister. I don't know what's going on in her world, over 2,000 miles away, and most days, i have no thoughts of it, because i am in a new world. That old every day familiar world has died, and where is it, that i thought would last forever? And i worry about my mom. Is she okay, in the dullness of my fading memory of her? Quantum nonlocality. I was cut out of a woman because i was upside down in the water tank. How did i get here? Caesarean section. There is nothing new under the sun.

0ther ethereal images, concepts:
recently i awoke in the night, a foggy fear sweeping over me, and for some reason i uncharacteristically stood up, from adam (dark river)'s couch in his room, and i swooned, falling to the floor, as if i had no muscles with which to move myself. I got up, walked into the bathroom, and dropped to the floor suddenly again, hitting my head on the edge of the sink. I felt as if it was my time to die, that the universe had overrided all my faculties and functions, that this was the culmination of my self-destructive thoughts and self-deprivation, and i didn't care. I was little disturbed at my apathy. I somehow expected the end to be like this. And maybe this was a premonition, a foreshadowing, or maybe i did die that night.

Pre-diction: an event or idea created through language; a memory of the future.

Memory: conscious ethereal image(s), scent(s), sound(s), idea(s), sensation(s), of an event that is layered over the present stream of events.

Diction: substance by which memory, prediction, or interpretation of the present is made; imposed meaning, order; tool for symbiosis with or manipulation of energy; evolutionary link between substance and ether. A mirror, through which the spirit sees its ethereal reflection, knowing itself as conscious energy, a creator, in spite of its physical form. A reminder of origins, through which a sense of permanency, immortality is achieved, language is itself a substance for recording the collected stories, insights, observations, of the (human) race.

at the beach, river says, oh, look at the little dog. And i think of his name-change to adam, and how the first man named the animals, and how the dog exists as dog only to us naming it. To the dog, it is not a dog. Humans, this subjugating race, dominating the world with its imposed limits. Language creates barriers. Then, last night, we watch The Rules of Attraction, where a couple of characters separated, in different situations, say, “You will never know me. You can never know anyone.” language is tricky, though, because it supposes things are knowable. It creates and sustains illusion. And illusions are built upon illusions. These illusions, of course, become reality for us, because of the nature of becomingness.
What else? (speak only truth. What resonates.)

walking back from walking jon half-way across the hawthorne bridge near four in the morning, after directing two guys to the prostitutes on burnside after they asked me, i stop at an intersection of streets for a truck. The guy behind the wheel decides to floor it, and i am a few feet from stepping into the intersection. If anyone had happened to step out into the road at that moment, they would be instantly killed by a vessel projecting through space at an unreal velocity. Is this natural? What are we doing? Playing with mortality at every moment. It's so easy to die. I think of a book of stories, or a television show making these realities evident, translating adult world ordinariness (apathetic rigidity) into child newness (wise, compassionate, aware).

A story where everyone communicates with symbols, without words: with hearts, for example.

A story where the world is without brands and money. Where there is only one kind of automobile, and the infinite choices are contained in colors, technological features, things that matter. And it is not a status symbol, but a beautiful work of genius.

A story where McDonald's arch ways are portals between worlds, and Western imperialism is an interdimensional idea to create oneness through domination, where it is neither “good” nor “bad,” but simply, necessary, for everything's purpose is: BEONE.

What am i? What is my universal purpose? Am i a buddha? I do not know where i came from. It is naive of anyone to assume they know. We've created the whys and hows of things. Through them all, what exists? I make connections between information, passing through, making an imprint on everything i touch. I follow the bread crumbs, i tell jon, and they seem to become more numerous when i follow them, and it's come to the point where i start seeing the hand throwing them. He says he knows what i mean, and has never talked to anyone who could put it so clearly before. My work here, if i never see him again, has been accomplished.

Everything speaks and shows itself through colors (light) and sound (also light), on this spinning ball floating in nothing. Maybe all the particles that form the earth are bound together by the same force binding us to it. Maybe it's all bound together by this glue called god.

The world is only as complicated as the human race has made it. I want to bring it back to simple. But it is simple and the world is realizing it without me. “Real-izing,” I tell Jon. “What are we doing?” I just observe. All the positive philosophizing discussions through which i've spread truth, all the people i've positively impacted by my presence, all the ideas and thoughts i've put into the world: it absorbs them and is changed by them. Is my purpose anything but this? It moves through me. Every choice, every failure is a success. There is no immorality and no obligation.

There is a circle known by some as earth. Perhaps it's known (or not known) by others as a warp of space-time, funneling. By others still, a work of art, by others still, as nothing.

___69696969696969696969696969696969696969696969(666)—999
a game (of consequences?)

between sleep and awake, is the body oscillating between itself and the ethereal realm of collective unconscious, a world just as, or more real, than the surface (at any given moment, i exist in other dimensions, where memories are still tangible events). We are approaching the point of origin, turning this ship around to go “forward to the past,” dying every time we cross the border, popping out of existence in one world to pop into existence in the inverse phase of our oscillation in the sine wave cycle (positive, negative?). The world we have made black and white, but it's not that way. or is it? And so time and events seem linear in the limited three dimensional phase, when it's a spiral. We're coiled, breathing, spinning, vibrating because of intense velocity. Where am i now? What about now? Space: where? Time: Now? “Back then.” “Next.”

And, I noted to Jon, I should be careful when talking about science, since I haven't studied it, although, as a culture, certain things that were mysteries in worlds past are less mysterious, entering the realm of common knowledge, things like Einstein's theory of relativity, light being both a wave and a particle, the microscopic world, the existence of invisible germs and bacteria. Yet this knowledge has not gotten rid of the mysteries. It has, though, in my opinion, introduced a dangerous level of ignorance and a new kind of self importance. Faith in scientific theory is just as blind as faith in religious thought, a faith in something not known first-hand unless the scientist or the prophet. So i tend to trust only that which i encounter first-hand. I trust my experience of the numinous.

Take me for a walk, O Jehovah, O Ethereal Becomeness, the Great Unconscious, the driving force that, through processes set in motion at a place and time before any of this was, is, perhaps, the only constant, the constant creator of our known world, because of which, we are also God and create and form the formless based on the form that had already come to be itself by the time we were born into it, that has come to be before we had physical form. Before that, was I also pure consciousness seeking form? I am, perhaps, pure consciousness seeking, again, its formlessness. Immateriality. Spirit and matter. Mind, matter.

Take me for a walk, please, Jehovah. Again. Get me outside of assumed form. Lead me to the form of spirit. You, in those sparkling silvery lighthouse stars, “Here I am! Send me, send me.” I am lost. Please find me. I've sent out the S.O.S. And you are finding me. When will these pen-pal letters end? When will i meet you in person? And will I find it was me all along?

from Center, Universe, That's It

Rushing water shouldn't sound that way, like ten industrial strength fans pushing out all the air. You know, it only takes about ten seconds for the world--as you know it--to come to an end, and a completely different one to begin. I had the shower blasting away my dead skin cells when it happened. The dawning of a new era--or a new eros, and a first era as far as I was concerned--as I found myself washing the bar of soap. Don't ask me why, I just was. Suddenly, why didn't exist. The way it was was the way it was. Soap needed to be cleaned, and it had to be done in that moment, and, of a sudden, I found myself in compliance with that simple truth.

Forming Genesis

Arc
I arc upwards, myself an ark carrying an entire cosmos on-board, surprisingly light and marshmallow, marshy and malleable, refusing to be puffed, and self-contained--observing its own exponential expansion, buoyant and boyish, contradicting mind-bottlement. The mind is a breathing organism, practicing lamaze for its dream birth, coordinates telescoping into center, contractions through rarefactions. The galvanized sheet metal tree, gleaming in the Midwestern Sun, creaks although still on Art Hill, a summer night breeze slightly crescendoing, blowing in from childhood miles forgotten and not retraced. It is teaching itself how to walk, synthesizing steel into woody chloroplastered ecstasy, an alchemy of dream and matter.


Television and Fire Pits
Drums of mercury singe in their singing, sing in their singeing, sponging up particles of my reflection, a stagnant puddle of muddled candy wrappers caked with dirt and sopping with moonshine. The conglomeration swallowing torrents of dry heaves into its collected guts, a reclaiming of media into medium, cotton-mouth and head, existing alone in a washed-out sunny ionic field, popping into French varicose veins of ore and orange poppies, and vanishing into unexploded paintings of some Andromeda sun in miniature, cobalt blue, a dwarf star, humming silent presence, eating fresh green corn, drinking its saliva from an ancient rock anomaly knowing peace like an uncracked geode, a forgotten wormhole, where yin and yang swirl to heartbeat through purple pudding, modifying genes outside of the tube of modified organisms which happen to be genies internally combusting while sitting on a landfill of Velveeta. While naming x-rays something more like xenon, invoking Adam as muse, enjoying toxicity, eating the waxy paintbrush with waxen lips, living gluten- and tax-free on the ruins of an American mint, one hundred per century.

Trumpets
Trumpets then trumpeting into ruddy bell flowers, periwinkles and pinot forming their pair somewhere before 1999, Adam's infant voice buckles two tectonic plates into Prehistory. He gargles and chokes on the salty sea water, sending tsunami shock waves into the dawn.

Fungi
Liberal fungi who resent the implications of infestation, explore euphoric utopias with fungicidal friends, breathing into cores of seedless palindromic grape candy, writing the definitive work, The Art of Artificiality, a shoddy constructed artifice in treatise form on acid-free paper, post-consumer waste, contained within a plethora of python-tangled constructs, deconstructed, counteracting aceteminophine, dissecting dioxyribonucleic acid dreams of the same circular windows lodging in weathered coastal lodges, in cathedrals of swaying sea cucumbers and cucumber melon doves, in a merangue menagerie of Muszorgsky's posthumously performed mazurkas, sidereeling in one wing of public television, crumbling down graham-cracker crumble crust.


Organic Matter
Through spitting oceanic ash, prehistoric
La Brea Califormica granite taken for granted.

And this is where you tell me about your four-thousand-foot, four-inch mountain
atop the coast, while we wind it, me falling asleep, in the back of your black Volkswagen Cabrio,
left ear popping sitting stationary ascending, my suspended body taking shotgun.

"Smelt sands are situated in nonfiction embankments," I read,
reading not unlike a pseudoscientific romance, as
spittal ebbs and flows in the Norwegian reader's mouth bay, in the corner
of corniness, Cheese Wiz frothed into fondue.

And "off-the-handle" handles like a breezy rider writing
into existence writhing phonemes, a phenomenon of phantom glints,
of phantasmagorical forethought morphing into furry fairy tails, like zygotes formulating zygotes,
fashioning form on a run-way, running its way to the brink of the telescope, through which plays re-runs of America's Next Top Model.