Oh

It is so difficult to understand the human condition. What we covet from afar, we idolize. What we actually get, we feel we don't quite deserve and fuck it up, or after a time, no longer appreciate.
We long for times past, and forget how then, we desperately longed for better days. We wish for a future we might already have in our hands. The present, is too beautiful, too fragile, too much to bear, so we never look into its eyes head on...

Dogs in sweaters rock!!!

One of the best thing about fall and winter, has to be dogs in sweaters. I have to admit, I always find myself  grinning at these sweater clad "fluffians" strutting the streets with their human companions danging on the end of deliberate color-coordinated leashes.

Long ago in the suburbs, I saw an occasionally well dressed canine, but Downtown Brooklyn, where I currently reside, is a veritable 'dogwalk', with every second dog sporting a fall/winter wardrobe.

It is not just designer clad Chihuhuas, looking like miniature versions of James dean with shrunken heads, their rhinestone studded leather jackets and booties wrapped around the arms of bored, blonde socialites.
Instead, it ranges from dogs of indeterminably mutt heritage wearing sweaters of equally dubious fabric content, to obviously pedigree Saint Bernhards in massive pseudo-burberry patterns. You can spot the organic or hemp dog sweaters a mile away. They are usually reminiscent of a fishermans jersey in lumpily cozy neutral knits.  

I glance at the owners of course. Spotting the hand knitter types (their dogs advertising what degree of skill their craft-humans are now on and if they are still dropping stitches along the way), or the hipsters who frequent vintage flea markets or upscale consignment stores looking for authentic 50's dog couture. I have to wonder what those dogs think of wearing a sweater with another dogs scent on it. Do they wonder what the other dog who wore it before was like? The affable way dogs explore others scent, I think they must consider all of that.

Have you noticed how dogs and owners coordinate not only their colors but their whole general demeanor? For example, there is one narrow greyhound from Park Slope, who looks like he is wearing a sturdy blanket, strapped on like a racehorse. He, elegantly floating along the block, with his equally long and lean jogger companion, she of course, wearing black leggings, which may as well be jodhpurs.
A little black and white french poodle with fringed bangs, peers up at me, wearing a red sweater and looking like a mod 80's french cafe.  

No matter their attire, dogs on walks are very similar. I love watching them in street sweeper mode, nose down they move forward, snuffling right and left methodically along the block, stopping with a jerk whenever they approach something interesting.

I love komondor dogs, especially those wearing clothing. They seem to always end up wearing something that looks like a buckled on placemat, due to the sheer vivacity of their swinging dreads.

I most love those colorful cable sweaters, especially the wooly ones which look broken in and in need of sweater shaving. Those dogs look like they should be lounging around in cafes, reading poetry or short stories by unknown (as of yet) authors and drinking tea long since gone cold.
Then you see immaculate groomed pedigreed pooches, wearing obvious designer sweaters, in the latest fall colors, both walker and walkee gambolling along fashionably under the apple skin shaded leaves.
You can spot the old money dogs, those sweaters that are classic, ageless and obviously high quality, but are sleek and as subtle as their owners who can be identified by their Italian.
Other dogs are outfitted according to theme, like the scotty dog, probably feeling incredibly cheesy,  kitted out in traditional tartan, down to the socks.
     
Some dogs seem rather menacing. Their girth, breadth and otherwise general massiveness, absence of lolling tongue, and glinty, glossy fang exhibit, possibly a grin, but equally possibly a perpetual rapper snarl.
These fearsome fluff-bearers make me giggle the most. Their owners, most of them wide shouldered and slightly uncoordinated, sometimes puts the most incongruous apparel on these beasts. Fleece pastel overcoats, tutu's, or better yet, reindeer sweaters with bobbly hats. I imagine not just any sweater comes in their size, and it usually looks absurd in the most delicious way possible.
I notice, the ones waiting outside stores for their owners are usually not wearing sweaters at all, their sad, melting eyes trained on the door, waiting to continue a walk that has suddenly, awfully turned into a dreaded errand.
Have you noticed all those 'new on store shelves' -but actually really old 80's sweater blends like modal, acrylic and viscose- we as consumers have been (re)introduced to lately?
I imagine doggy sweaters have been hit by the same revolution. I bet dogs also are aware that good old fashioned natural fabrics like wool, feel warmest-albeit itchies. Cotton is just soft and comfortable, even when it starts unravelling and losing its shape after one short season. So, maybe I can concede, a little bit of lycra does a sweater good.

Ahhh, dogs in sweaters. One of lifes little pleasures.

 

Eyes on the skies

Brooklyn, a vaguely satisfying incongruence of a place. Avant-garde careful anon-bodies, in horned rimmed frames and organic cotton undies, abiding smugly amongst ancient mortar and flagstone, 200 odd years in the making. Mere sojourners though, on massive trees and rocks which carry in their threads and grooves the adage of the sage Rashi, spoken over 3000 years ago. “There is nothing new under the sun!” 
Obscure bands be damned, fashion styles no matter how mod, have been cycled, let alone recycled, radical ideas spoken, re-spoken, be-spoken.
It has all always been here from the beginning and we in our arrogance, overlook it all until we are ready to discover it, or lose it, then rediscover it too little and too late.
The primordial laughs without mockery.  

Grit under fingernails, the absolute french manicure. We have the grit of community gardens with crystal-rock deodorized hippies, Starbucks coffee ground grit, late night diner grit, posh pointy red framed Loboutin grit, hobbyist hipster grit and genuine, hard working, paycheck to paycheck blue collar worker grit who compose the central nervous system of our country. The blue collar humans whom both struggle and also truly exist by working with their hands...Those that labor a contrived desk existence, do envy the blue, no matter what they may say. Ask them how many cop, firefighter, cowboy and craftsman shows they watch?  
After all, we as people need to create. We need to see what we have wrought, and not simply on paper and backlit screen.
I have a little deck off my apartment. I can sit there and see red brick and vine, sky and a little bit of magic. I can glimpse neighbors, silhouettes in windows or clumps in yards, but there is depth and distance, and that is just right.
Next door to me, there used to be a symbol of suburban resistance, an overgrown forest of a garden. It was somewhat like the secret garden, without the key. Leaves woven within high grass, branches and twigs intertwined, a bouquet of shaded green. What a waste though, a gorgeous virgin in the midst of Beltane. She was romantic, but a fertile waste of a garden in Brooklyn, where a little patch is all the first floor dwellers are lucky to get, all others get is wistfulness.  Fireplaces, barbecue and just digging in the dirt is an exquisite luxury  in an apartment culture.
Then, one afternoon, it was gone, cleared, a war zone of landscaping or perhaps chemotherapy of a child.
She was cleared, and then the displaced spiders came to visit.
Its not that I don't love spiders. But its more like 'they are just not my type, sort of sensibility. They are fine in all their multi ocular, hirsute, venomous glory, I just have no desire whatsoever to ever hang out with any of them, though I feel bad they lost their habitat.
Spiders, you know the sort of people you can be friendly to, but it requires endless effort and careful maneuvering? The kind of effort that feels like studying for a History test with dates and places. The type that has you willing your phone to ring, to text, to anything. The type that drives one to drink, or go use the bathroom and pick your facial imperfections into disasters,  just for a bit of a break from the tedium and tension.
The people I love to relax with, do not require the peripheral  entertainment of those with hairy legs and an endless supply of hereditary venom.
I got some spider spray and crossed my fingers they found a lovely haven to web in.

Mostly on that deck though, I look upwards to the heavens.
The stars here, are often obscured by city soot but they pass through, luminaries on tour, a spark of the exotic, a plume of existential potential, then onwards.
As the flare passes, the grim returns. It all seems deep shadow for a moment, a black hole of silence out there on the deck in my plastic chair. 

......
A star is energy and light, held together by its own gravity.

The matter of a black hole is not understood, only that it is created by massive stars as they end their lives as supernova, then grow by sucking in all the energy around them. The stars implode due to their 'core- soul' which has become too weighty to support its own gravity.

Interestingly enough, long before 'black holes' were discovered, Greek mythology had an idea of chaos as a Goddess of sorts, often a snake, and she always wanted to oppose the Gods and destroy everything to return it all to void. This idea of chaos was described as vacuum or void created when heaven and earth were separated.

There is a term in the old testament to define this nothingness, as "tohu-uvohu- null and void." right before it added that the spirit of Godliness hovered over the 'face of the waters.' This was right before ultimate creation of light and dark, which did not even exist before the moment.

I do agree there are patterns in energy, woven nets of light, helix's, restless but orderly repeating forms and shapes and osmosis of energy until some sort of equilibrium occurs, only to shift back again like ripples. There is a religious thought that the world is being recreated every moment. I can believe that in this context...Those ripples are a constant hum.

In people too, there are those that are luminaries, they are in a constant state of emitting warmth and luminescence to others and to themselves. There are others, that are....well... the further level of quintessential ***hole. The actual black hole...

To explain, I use the term, to describe both soulless voids of people, and also in a much lesser sense, I use the term to describe "black holes of need", which are people who take and take from other people and never give anything back, because they are so self absorbed, they do not realize there is anything past the fringes of their blackness. They are the friends who suck people into negativity and drama and constantly pull energy from a person. You can give and give, but the bucket never gets full ,they are a vacuum because they are a 'non thing' and do not have that sense of self on their own and therefore need to constantly have others define their reality, which is not possible.

The more serious black hole, is of course the ones that actively damage others. They are the most toxic of spiders, the black widow, the violin spider, only compounded because they do not have eight hairy legs and warning markings on their thorax.

There is no doubt that evil, or soullessness is a terrible inversion of what was once good. The behavior itself is the most terrible betrayal simply because the most sacred trusts are violated, and the acts of abuse, are actual evil parodies of what should be acts of light, but in contexts are devastation.

The soulless black hole person, would be consistent with the idea of the massive star weighed down by its own gravity, flashing into destruction, then becoming utterly empty. There is also no doubt that evil and emptiness are both deeply attracted to light, and both wants desperately to own it and through it, somehow feel alive or clean again, and also wants to destroy and annihilate it because they despise it. This is true of the worst kind of abusers, especially those who seek out innocence to destroy. It is the very sacrilege of fracturing light, that they seek, possibly with the utterly wrong idea of some kind of hope to be touched by the light at the devastating cost to the one who they hurt, which is acceptable to them in their state of null and void.There is no doubt, the back hole in science is in a sense, a one way journey into darkness.

So what to do once this black hole has touched a person? How to stop the light, the dreams, the thoughts, the aspirations, the sense of self, from being sucked into the void? I would say, it is a question of gravity. The connection to the blackness would be severed, and the experience, slowly loses its own gravitational pull to the void, through the steady opposition of darkness, which is love and loyalty, healing and light. 

.......
That is really why I look up. It makes sense to seek the stars, look upwards to the luminaries, because they are there, no matter if you can see them through the smog or not.
Brooklyn, a place where we can keep our eyes on the heavens. Ultimately, a habitat, forever untouched like the spirit of an indomitable child no matter what happens to the topography...

Read

My beloved books, in whose words and stories, I hide for hours amongst dearest friends. I know you intimately, the black, the white, the in between. I have always gained strength and inspiration and courage from your pages. I cry, hot, sad tears over your protagonists, locked into the words as they are, I laugh loudly and suddenly at the humor of writers, wise to the absurdity of the advent of existence, startling my children and my pets. I shake my head in disgust at lovely characters doing ridiculous, broken things, and I so often accidentally scallop your pages in the bathtub...There is little better then the act of ignoring my phone, and the chaos of the outside, for the luxury of a pure, undiluted read...

Spring brings rains

Tides of wind scarves

fire dance in gusts

on the throat of the storm

Vertical pinstripe

quite lovely

On leaf veins and bark furrow

blush spread

on brick

wet thread

on window

brilliantly lit by street lamp

It falls, as far as the eye imagines it can see

And fabrics flap

swollen

against the legs of children

who giggle and court trouble

in the irresistible seduction of puddles

Mother earth

rich runnels soak and seep

wood-wet splintered thorn rivers

embedded in ground shaved and sheared fresh

across fields, highways, byways

reds and greens and stone

the scent of seed

in the midst of the cognizance of growth

under storm drain ditch sudden rage

of rivers woven with infinity's mark

On waters, intense surge and sojourn

behold there is fire on the edge

a cadence of a tenor depth

they fall up from the black tar blaze

of water stars on sidewalk

a caul, an amniotic wash

in the way of heavens rupture

and the flood and wash of torrents

slow and steady

love

and the keen edge of celestial breath

as it blusters and blazes

At this age, my face feels more honest somehow.
It shows the mark of emotion, the expressions that pass across and melt away, as momentary seasons would. Only gradually as sentient trees, they have whittled in, water droplets on rock and moss forming on stone and speak the truth of my smile, my frown, my worries, my laugh.
Even my eyes, there is a different light to them now, different insight, different knowledge, some gorgeous, some beautiful, some pain-filled and difficult to bear.
With times blade on me, I will show you who I truly am and how I have lived.

Words...

Actions speak louder then words, an adage so old nobody quite knows who composed it. Words are often merely pretty garb, while actions are the soul and substance underneath, the body of truth which supports the voice. Yet, sometimes the action required is warm words alone. Words are...quite something too.

God yes, I love words. They can be poison,daggers, whittlers,brushes, bricks, paintbrushes, thread, needle and wire... and sometimes words are hands and lips.

January, the silver vigil

"Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam"

Direct my way in your sight, O Lord my God

"Av harachamim shochen ba'meromim

Be'rachamav ha'atzumim hu yifkod be'rachamim"

The Father of mercy who dwells on high in His great mercy will remember with compassion...

January-

Memory itself contains great irony.

The same moment can seem an eternity ago

and just yesterday

and the word for loss is choke

when I can hardly breathe for it

stuck in my throat

all of those stray lamentations

for the souls I am bound to

but have somehow yielded in the annals

and in the hallways

and there is only infinite universe

where you, my history, my legend

were once my flesh and blood

and I choke

I ducked the last hug

as we passed in the hallway

carpeted brown as it were

your eyes, dazed and full of pain

met mine

your little girl

and you opened your thin arms carefully

pale as a clenched fist

spirit gently ebbing and fading

just under your skin

pages of a beloved book

left out in the sun

full of fear, I ran

Your arms slowly lowered

and your eyes slipped off mine

and went beyond my horizon

and just like that

I lost you

My little boy

passed me in the hallway

the other day

I held out my arms to him

He grinned, ducked and ran

I closed my eyes for a moment

as my heart beat a soft shadow

drum in my chest,

then I said, 'Lets try that again'

and I hugged his bright, laughing spirit in my arms.

I look in other people's broken mirrors

discarded on the side of the road

and see angles of myself I have never seen before

Something less then solid

are we even really here?

January is the white of pink

frost bitten fingertips and

the last obstinate autumn leaves

clasping chilled branches steadfastly

against wind as cold as an almost touch.

and evergreen boughs in shadow green

are stooped with sight because they know

Back when it was always brown paper and string

I would draw with sharp stones on the etch a sketch sidewalks

always faces, with smiles and hands that held others hands

and chimneys with dancing curls of crayon smoke

January, a silver vigil of a sentinel angel

with its impending snow, a withheld cry

and a flush slow spreading across cheekbones

wing feathers reaching up and out

It is difficult not to surrender to the lofty skies

and the cloud swans with graceful throats

the wide, wise blue breath of winter

so stark and so cold as it sweeps across soaring towers

the high places where the air is thin but the heart grows large with grace

and cotton buttoned shirts billow in the wind

I exhale a cloud from lips which spread

like blood stains on linen

I must blow this all away

all this dust from the lintels of the tombs

and the lingering scent of beeswax and cassia and cedar oil

I inhale a kiss

fragrant as vanilla pods, scraped with a keen blade

I dream of rippled oceans of warm salt

and tides like scarves

spilling on the hush of sand

I shiver now

because I am too damn stubborn to button up my coat

and I cant help smiling at the sight

of twenty seven pigeons squatting shoulder to shoulder

on a rooftop

somehow so devotional

In their found space of serenity and solace

January ramblings

Even after days, months and years together have collected like newspapers tucked behind the windy bridges of the world, we cannot say we know someone entirely. Not family, not friends nor lovers can be ever utterly 'known', which is wonderful and exactly as it should be.
Our personality, (and thereby our thoughts, our words and our actions) comes from the part of us that is infinitely alive, the spirit.
We have transient form, like flame. Our interests, hobbies and preferences evolve or not, but they deepen and change. Experiences shape us, kiss us, hug us or bruise and scar us. We flicker, we steady, we spark, we grow intense, we fade but we burn upwards, we rise, always rise, even as our candle burns low.



..................................

Despite being utterly non observant nowadays, I find there are some ideas, specifically Kabbalah rooted-Hasidic principles, which profoundly resound within me and always will. I apply them to my life whenever possible.

Such as, in Hasidic philosophy, there are three levels of learning before you can consider the information entirely integrated...

Chachmah (knowledge)
Binah (wisdom)
Da'as (understanding)

I use these ideas in conversation. especially a conversation with any kind of gravity or substance.

First, I listen to what I know they are saying, the actual content of the words (Chachmah) .

Next, with what I know (Binah) my own wisdom and experience, I listen for not only what what they mean to say but what they are not putting in to words, between the lines if you will. I also pay attention to context. This will give me an idea of what they are truly trying to communicate.

Lastly, I want to understand and internalize the message (Da'as) . If it is something they want advice on, I really want to think it through before responding. This is the final idea of understanding, where the knowledge and wisdom becomes part of you, ready to be applied even unconsciously.
There is much to know and learn, and to truly learn means not just width of learning but depth learning...