Mr. Crab

This is the first poem I wrote when I started taking poetry more seriously, as a way of exploration. It’s eleven years old now, yet it speaks to me more as time goes by. I look at it now, and wonder how I knew to write that when I feel I’m still learning the deeper truths within it. I think it goes that way with a lot of poets. There is this tapping into a well of wisdom that may not be there in everyday life or conscious realization?so the poem guides the spiritual development that is to come (or should come)!

that’s MISTER Crab, to you!

I am not my skin
I am not my name
any answer you expect when you ask

“who are you?”

only removes you from the truth:

rockfirecrab

now rock?
not a rock,

but rock.

the stuffs of the stones by your steps
are the matters of which I am made.
carbon frames and fathers my every cell.

I am one with the coal of the mines
and the diamonds of crowns.

cousin to comets
and brother to pebbles.
child of both Adam and atoms.

and neuronfire
shooting synapses
an electric soul from scalp to toe
a Kirlian orchestra
of magical microsparks.

now hearthlight and heartfire
warmth and passion
a burning faggot
?and wildfire, deathfire in the night.

a worldful of magma underneath
untapped flamefluid
liquidfire

(dare I journey to the center of my earth
and voyage farther than even Verne ever ventured?)

and what creature?
is that ill-hewn rock alive? endowed with fire?
am I crab or hedgehog or maybe anemone?
do I pinch or prick or sting?

jagged and hard outside,
ugly as a brain and frightened as a heart
but alive and alert,
always aware of all around
scurrying sideways…
crazy cancrizan crawls
ever-wandering anywhere, everywhere
but forward.

eyestalks swivel wildly
scanning a panorama of dangerous possibilities
and inviting curiosities.

you mustn’t forget the pincers?pincerquillstings?
pincers waving:
don’t hurt
watch out

(i’ll hurt you back
. . . if i can)

above all
above all
don’t
don’t

carelessly crush me underfoot

I’m praise and slur,
kiss and curse?
a Havdalah in skin.

I’m godling and devil
angel and imp
lover and loner
healer and harmer
friend and fiend
joy and jab
jade and joke
jewel and junk
jester and jouster
Jesus and Judas

(crabby fire
fiery rock
rocky creature)

rose and thorn.

—jon zuck | kent, ohio | 1994

Doldrums

People usually associate doldrums with summer. My personal doldrums usually don’t happen in summer, but in autumn or winter. The loss of sunshine and warm weather tends to affect me deeply. The last week or so, I haven’t meditated at all, and it’s wearing on me.

Any sailing ship can experience virtual doldrums just by taking the sails down, and for someone on the mystical path, that’s what it’s like when you stop taking the time to center yourself in This.

I’m feeling a certain inner resistance to getting back “on the wagon.” Why is it that part of myself wants to be miserable? I think it’s largely that resistance to change. There’s a lot I need to change, particularly in matters of food, sleep, exercise and personal discipline, things that I’ve struggled with now for … decades. I’m getting blood results back tomorrow. I may well find out I’m “pre-diabetic” or worse.

My teacher points out that the test of spiritual transformation is how it works out in the world of everyday life. Anyone who knows me knows that in spite of my high ideals and longing to awaken, I’m sleepwalking most of time. Sometimes, though, I just happen to be aware of it.

So I know what’s going on. My ego wants to hang on to the discontent rather than move on, change, and relish every moment as the sacred present. Doldrums. Yuck.

Blog is back

Well, my blog is working again. I tried to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 over the weekend, and ran into a nightmare of issues. Finally, I came to my senses today and reverted back to my antiquated 2.661. I will upgrade eventually, but I’m in no hurry after that mess.

Buy bewilderment

A friend recently asked me to explain a verse of Rumi:

Sell your cleverness,
and buy bewilderment.

I tried explaining it like this:
The heart of mysticism is realizing the Mystery of God. Realizing is not understanding in the intellectual sense. A young child realizes God’s beauty, order and perfection through their absorption, curiosity and naked openness to the world. Hence, Jesus said we must come as little children or we cannot enter the Kingdom of God (the realm where God is all).

You might also call it the difference between apprehending and comprehending. Luther says, “bewilderment is the true comprehension” to be lost in God is to be more “found” than anyone can be with a GPS!

“Lose your psyche for my sake, and you will find it.”

Rumi’s “sell your understanding” means do not attempt to seek the holy Presence through your mind. The mind has its own purposes, but that’s not one of them. It’s not knowledge, but emptiness, openness, spaciousness of the heart. Room for God, or Capax dei. The “capacity” toward God that Mary had, and brought forth Christ.

“Buy bewilderment” means that as you begin to see God anew, stop trying to constantly note distinctions and comparisons, and allow yourself to be amazed and even confused.

Isaiah recorded God saying “as heaven/sky is higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, my thoughts than your thoughts.”

We can not understand God’s thoughts, because he does not have them in the sense that we do. When God—the Source of all that is, moves in any way, the result is appearance in the manifest world we call Creation. If God thinks “tree,” a tree appears.

Encountering God’s presence is bewildering. It cannot be “understood” for it is beyond mind. Kierkegaard said, “if you think you understand, then it isn’t God.” In fact, it is the nature of the ego, what Paul called “the flesh,” to recoil from this Presence. It’s like dipping your toe in a swimming pool and deciding it’s too cold. But if you just jump in, after the initial “bewilderment,” you begin adjusting to the water.

In the same way, as we begin to rein in the egoic mind, we become more and more accustomed to this bewilderment, and start realizing it as our natural resting place.

In the Gospel of Thomas verse 2, Jesus is recorded as saying: “Blessed are they who do not cease seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. And being disturbed, they will marvel and reign over All.”

After being disturbed and marveling, the culmination of the process is “ruling over All,” which I believe is a reference to divine transformation, or theosis—a state of union with God, in which the human soul becomes so permeated by God’s Spirit that we become like Christ, fully human, yet fully divine. The imago dei (image of God), the essence of our being, becomes clear. Like Mary, we bring forth Christ’s presence into the world. With Jesus, we become “other members” of the Body of Christ, and yet no less Christ than He is.

When I read Paul now, I sense his dismay that this wasn’t happening to everyone in the Church. “How is it that you act as mere men,” he says, as though he expected Christians to become “gods with God” (as one of the Church Fathers put it). After all, that’s exactly what happened to him after his blinding, bewildering encounter on the way to Damascus.

For most though, it takes ongoing work to subjugate the ego. And it’s not by trying to do better, pray harder, believe more strongly, doing more good deeds, or anything like that, but by constant releasing and emptying. What Jesus called self-denial and “carrying the cross” (to die), and Paul called putting off the “old man” and “dying to self.”

Enlightened teachers talk about the “death” of the self or the dismantling of the ego, (although in fact there always is some egoic remnant that remains.) My own teacher told me that it is very bewildering to find yourself without a “self.” But it does happen, whether in ever-so-gradual stages, or in an unexpected blast of enlightening grace, as with Paul.

My greatest difficulty on the path is I keep buying understanding. Knowing stuff is SO comforting to my ego. I’m smart. I’m a Christian mystic. I’m somebody. And being “somebody” keeps me from being the nobody, the empty vessel ready to be filled.

Still catching up

I’m still catching up on reading these few blogs. Wow. What I miss when I don’t get to them for a couple of weeks. Your blogs demand thought, reflection, and inspire comments. This is not just a matter of reading a couple of screens of info on less than two dozen blogs.

When I come up for air, I’m going to begin writing about the “first contact” stories of 2005: War of the Worlds, Surface, Invasion, and Threshold. It seems to me that this year science-fiction has impacted television more than ever before, though all the stories are earthbound and tense. What are your thoughts?

What did I do to deserve you?

The last couple of days, my great intentions (ha!) of writing new pages for this site have been thwarted. I’ve been catching up on blogs. You, my blogger friends, have made me drunk. As I told Meredith in a comment. I literally feel dizzy after drinking in the ecstasy and realization of her last post Sadiq’s blog has largely the same effect. And Mark at Eternal Awareness has 2 posts on his front page that made my jaw drop.

Ron, my preacher friend at Symphonic, shares his ever-increasing mystic insights, questing, and love, as do all my other blog friends? Trev, Darrell, and Bob, Rick, Twyla, Larry , ?forgive me if I left anyone out!

I keep my list of bloglinks small because I really do read them, and hey, I’ve got a life. But what a life it is when you are surrounded by souls like these: geniuses of the heart?mystics. Angels with crooked halos and grunge guitars, laughing and crying at the mad, mad, glad, glad situation of being spirit in a body in a world like this. Writers with an honesty and humility that puts me to shame.

I think no one ever had company like this.

Although I live alone, I feel so incredibly blessed to have friends who aren’t just “blessings,” but are manifestations of Blessing itself.

What did I do to deserve you?

Thoughtsea

Isn’t it amazing, that we live in a sea of ideas, interpretations, associations, and identifications?an ocean of superflous thoughts?when all we need is to live?

And I probably do it more than most. How wonderful are those moments when the noise falls silent, and I just am.

Being human being

My teacher often points out that the Spirit seeks embodiment. “Being a human is such a wonderful thing, everyone’s trying to do it, even God!” Tonight, he said that all God wants is a human being. That’s what the Creator created. Unfortunately, God got a little less than what was ordered!

In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle puts it this way:

You are a human being. What does that mean? Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and Being. Mother, father, husband, wife, young, old, the roles you play, the functions you fulfill, whatever you do?all that belongs to the human dimension. It has its place and needs to be honored, but in itself it is not enough for a fulfilled, truly meaningful relationship or life. Human alone is never enough, no matter how hard you try or what you achieve. Then there is Being. It is found in the still, alert presence of Consciousness itself, the Consicousness that you are. Human is form. Being is formless. Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.

Life really is so much simpler than almost anyone would have you believe.