Why Dogs Cry

A dog irritates his master by wanting so much love and attention.

I wonder if God thinks the same of humans.

If so, I should apologize to Him.

I am also an obnoxious creator.

I fail to perfectly live in His image.

I must apologize to you, all of you, for that.

All that good advice from the greats --

the thinkers, the cultural builders,

the saints, the artists, the parents,

the motivational speakers,

the voices of consciousness

and Life herself --

I do my best to listen

and take those encouraging words

all the Way. To give them back, too.

Walk the walk, they said,

don't just talk the talk.

Buddha was a man

and what would Jesus do

and so was Carnegie and Rockefeller

Gandhi, Newton, all of 'em.

The world seems to love them so;

but this is only seeming,

not the whole story.

I am sure of it.

In fact, they were difficult to love;

at least at some point

in their lives the were difficult to match

and people hate that

and they, feeling hated

while trying to love so deeply,

can only turn to God.

And, like adorable, yet

obnoxiously helpless dogs,

beg for His touch.

Hafiz-inspired

My spirit cartwheels in the 
virgin fields of hope illuminated 
by the auras of children begot
of Love and Reason.
And, If I am a human
I will surely know to follow
for humble eyes
spy masters, plain-clothes
or otherwise,
and to follow begs
of the heart the courage
to live forever
with our without
the body:
but impossible
to take one breath of
Eternity
without faith.

Café de manhã

Reading clouds out the café window
in a hoodie and fleece pants
and house slippers,

southern hemisphere
purple black nights
and pink clouds
told us, days ago,

you'd better bundle up.

And the books
have ideas that authors wrote
years ago and thought
even longer ago
and sat and labored
to spell it all out for sleepy
audiences like me.

Wake up and smell the coffee,
be amazed by nature
and life and human fucking beings,
say the authors.

And the clouds?
you should also ask.
Who made those,
and what cryptic message might
they form in your mind
in your heart?

I don't have the answer to that,
says the poem:
for that, you must go
and see for yourself.

Praying Over Food

You, pancakes with egg and bacon in between; you, double espresso from Carmo de Minas; you, delicious bolo de fubá with crunchy, sugary crust on top; you, shot of sparkling water: my belly is your Heaven, for I see you for the energy you are. Let me bow my head over you and pray, and my prayer will be a contract to use the energy you give me to do Good. Your destiny is a gesture of kindness; a timely moment of self-restraint; a smile; that hidden extra effort that I put into Loving Life and my Fellow Human Beings will come from the energy that each of you provide me with now, at breakfast.

So worry not, oh food of Foods, oh energy of Energy, oh cooperative vibrations of the celestial orchestra grouped in your respective forms like the drums, strings, and trumpets at the gates of the Kingdom! See that my teeth are the Pearly Gates and my body is the karma burning furnace in which your tastiness, your Love, will know both an End and a Beginning, and that you shall be dispatched, post-haste, through Acts directed at the King of Kings, the God of Gods, as flowers of celebration at the wedding of opposing houses from which the Prince of Peace will be born.

Amen.

Vibrations & Silence

At the horizon where a

Now larger than

you might

imagine

meets a tomorrow

beyond Belief,

Saint Truth awaits you.

He will appear at

the doorway,

heart-shaped,

and you'll say,

no way, I don't believe it,

how obvious, how

can it be?

You will be the silence

digesting your own questions

into quarks and quasars

beaming back upon yourself

and when you are the silence

your body is not of skin

and forms exposed by light

but vibrations:

You are either music,

noise, or static within

your hitherto silent eternity;

but it depends on so many things

and it is a formidable task

that the sharpest logic

should shake hands with Truth

and not need to see its blood

to know it lives.

What I've Learned from Dogs

I was a cross country runner at Cornell University from 2001 to 2003. The city of Ithaca New York, where you will find Cornell, is beautiful because of its rather balanced relationship with the natural environment. In Ithaca, you will find waterfalls, gorges, hills, woods, and Cayuga lake, among other wonders of nature. And as a runner I had the special opportunity to know these places in the intimate way that only running, hiking, or biking can offer.

Our team would leave from Bartel's Hall and follow one of many paths that covered anywhere between 5 and 30 kilometers. There was one path that was mostly pavement – relatively quiet streets shaded by trees lining the road, along which there were modest, middle and upper middle class homes with yards and dogs and so forth. On this running loop (I forget the name of it now), there was this one house in particular that had two dogs and they would always, without fail, dart out of where ever they were and race toward the street where were were running. And they would be barking madly.

A dog's bark betrays the emotions and/or intentions of the dog. Whereas the dog may simply want to show that it is excited or happy, the bark, at least to the human ears, sounds the same as the bark of an angry attack or a threat.

I remember the first runs, responding with fear, thinking that the dogs would come chase after me and bite me, which is not unheard of. It took me a few times to not be afraid or to respond with my own “bark” to show that they weren't going to psychologically dominate me, and they would either retreat or stop barking and run more calmly behind me until they determined they were far enough away from their home or running with me simply wasn't as fun without the barking.

My self-awareness evolved considerably, I'd say, because of these dogs. After conquering my reaction and indeed rendering it a conscious response to their barking, I still had a sensation of annoyance. “Why do these dogs always come barking every time we run by?” I thought to myself each time. And this irritated me. I thought that the dogs were irritating me and felt that irritation evolve on its own, conquering my opinions of dogs in general, even, creating limits within my heart and mind, reinforcing the feeling of irritation with the labor of constructing arguments to the end of validating my reaction.

The truth is, the dog is a dog. Dogs bark. That is a part of what they do. I don't underestimate the dog's sensitivities and capacities. Indeed, I am sure that the dog has an awareness equal to mine, even though I could not tell you how it is equal and in what ways a dog, specifically, is aware and spiritual and so forth. But I believe it.

I am a human being. At least in terms of rational thinking, the dog and I are not equals. From the human stand point, it is less the dogs responsibility to stop barking and “behave” then it is my responsibility to not permit the dog to have the power of irritating me. In the end, it is my emotional response. Correction: it was my emotional reaction that the dog elicited.

Much later, years later, it occurred to me that the special feature of my being is that I can train myself to respond in a manner that protects my peace, my happiness, or whatever it is I wish to preserve. This is the difference between reacting and responding. The dog was reacting to our passing by. The dog had no reason to change his reaction, no reason to fashion a response. I did. My reaction was my problem and, as a human being, I had to do the intellectual labor of reshaping that reactive energy so that it did not perturb me.  If my emotions bother me, it is my responsibility to examine why and see what I can I can do to alter my response before I blame whom or whatever elicited said reaction.

"This, I think, is the definition of 'response-ability'", barked the dog day after day to me -- I just didn't understand, at the time.

The Meaning of Life III: Competition and Institutional Goals

In which competitive sport does the competitor wake up and complete everyday?  Outside of abstractions of what "training" is, the answer is, "no sport has a competition everyday".  In the same way, why would our entire economic system, which has significant influence over our politics and thus inter-national communications, be based on competition?

Our political system should be based entirely on cooperation.  In the same way that a teacher must acknowledge and address the level of a student and his or her learning preferences, so too must a international community evaluation its constituents in terms of the "hidden curriculum" which is to Love.  I know it may sound absurd to say that a Nation's curriculum is to Love, but it is True, regardless of its silly, non-political sounding humanity.  It is true because all Peoples seek to survive, and in order to survive one must be well-verse in Love, especially when those People seek to survive in a diverse global community such as ours today.

Now, this means that any Nations with seemingly everlasting historical conflict need to invest, politically and economically, in the resolution of that conflict.  Institutions should conscientiously, openly, and by design have this as their end.  And this is not the responsibility of just the nation with the conflict, but of all nations.

So, if one nation does not have the means to resolve its conflicts due to the fact that it feels it must, first are foremost, compete in the global market, then that nation should be pardoned from competition in the global market and all other nations should contribute to the operations of that nation, so long as that nation focuses, for whatever duration of time necessary, on the resolution of its crippling conflicts.