"Master your mind and you can re-create your reality"  ~Sonia Ricotti

A Color of the Sky

BY TONY HOAGLAND

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,

driving over the hills from work.

There are the dark parts on the road

                     when you pass through clumps of wood   

and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,   

but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize

for being so boring at dinner last night,

but can I really promise not to be that way again?   

And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing   

in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;

the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves

are full of infant chlorophyll,   

the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,   

and on the highway overpass,

the only metaphysical vandal in America has written   

MEMORY LOVES TIME

in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.

She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.   

Years ago she penetrated me

but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,   

I never got her out,

but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.   

What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.   

What I thought was an injustice

turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store   

and the police station,

a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,   

like a sudsy mug of beer;

like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.   

It’s been doing that all week:

making beauty,

and throwing it away,

and making more.

True love/gratitude > limerence

From Hamlet

Nature is fine in love, and where ’tis fine,

It sends some precious instance of itself

After the thing it loves.

-Ophelia

Felt Sense

From The Journey (Brown 1992) As cited in Chapter 14 of Lenses by Kraus (2008).

This is Tom Brown Jr. sharing how "Grandfather" described an inner vision:

"The tightness in your gut when you tried to remember but could not was your Inner Vision trying desperately to talk to you. . . . That tension, that deep gut feeling, is exactly how our inner vision tried to talk to us. Thus when the answer is finally found on a logical level, the gut reacts with the release of tension. Your greater self is so relieved that you have found an answer, an answer that it knew all the time."





Something else shared in the book is by Gendlin (1996, p.37-38).:

"the odd feeling of knowing you have forgotten something. . . . You are troubled by the felt sense. . . . Notice that you don't have factual data. You have an inner aura, an internal taste. Your body knows but you don't. . . . Then suddenly, from this felt sense, it bursts to the surface [remembering what you forgot]. Somewhere in your body, something releases, some tight thing lets go."

As I walk this line, I am bound by the other side
And it's for my heart that I'll live.

--Warpaint

Honey of My Failures

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt --marvelous error!--
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

-Antonio Machado