often fussing like blowing wind

we shuffle leaves that have already been raked. 

nothing's right.

no orders please.

no humor honors our strange dislikes.

we fear taking life as the trip it is.

journeying through incongruities 

like white-water rafters

we dodge bumpy rocks 

the best we can.

we play "Salmon" leaping 

toward certain death.

"to hell with it", we say

rambling about our stinking pits

holding us captive there

in what we'd like to escape.

*Afraid!  Afraid!  Yet we strive to dominate others with our fears - in the one space where God is: stillness.

*Every place where one settles has what one needs and what one doesn't want.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -We will never catch up with real people unless we start with the body of the earth, which is also our body.

  -...to laugh at having believed we had encountered God, to blush at having said it, to enter a kind of nakedness in discovering the artificiality of ideas that we had imagined were part of us. And in this way to begin to exist in a more relaxed style, more available to the first comer.  You can be like someone who all his life shouted out his faith, which he believed was his own, and suddenly, perhaps at death's door, realizes that he is surrounded by darkness and asks himself, "Have  you been lying?" Better to wake up before you're laid out for burial. 

  -There is no spiritual life which does not encounter deception and disillusionment, suffering and confusion.