brianburke.net

Before the Laundry, to the Proverbial “You”

brian — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:59:35 +0000

No, I don’t have good reasons
for all the things I do,
and I don’t think I ever will.

Isn’t it enough that I simply live,
in a world whose cruel tricks
have silently persuaded me
to consider leaving this fleshly,
painful existence of my own accord?

But this is not for you
or your questions, anyway.

What it is for I can’t really say.

If I could give you the way
the place in between the worlds
courses through me without explanation,
I would. I really would. I mean it.
But your gateway in has a different
key than mine.

See, now you might be starting
to get the picture; this is where I live.
It wasn’t much of a choice, either.

After enough trips around the bend,
you may start to notice, as I have,
that there really is no divide after all.
Paradox is the truth and the myth.
I wish I could tell you more,
but I have to go and do the laundry.

The Come-down

brian — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:15:53 +0000

Fading.
Half-heartedly wishing in semi-defeat that the machine would just work the way it’s supposed to, and trying to act upset when it doesn’t; failing.
Drag my right arm with my left arm like a sack of bricks to the pen. Forget it. Dead weight. Dead sentences languishing themselves onto a page, as if they were dead fish suddenly endowed with one last pitiful lunge toward existence, reminiscing of dead anguish.
A sad porno set post-climax, wiping up what once possessed traces of true romance, eyes toward the floor and/or the proverbial distance, the energy required for human eye contact having been exhausted and replaced with malaise and melancholy. Rocks. Islands. And everyone pretends not to notice that she’s just behind that flimsy door, getting herself off in a makeshift bathroom because she needs it, and he didn’t care enough. No one cared enough, not like they used to anyway.
Partial images of past lives, once-experienced miracles, play across movie screens in the background of my memory, for some reason taking place in ancient Egypt or San Francisco bars at night. Endless adventure, eyes twinkling with rapture. I kind of watch. Look around into what remains of my hollow and lonely environs, and the moment spreads nothing before me but flatness and cornfields as far as the eye can see. Corn everywhere. All the same color. Flat.
Really though, bear with me, this is where it gets good (I guess). Take up the middle of one chow mein noodle with the right-most tine of your fork and raise it above your plate. Now close your eyes and picture to yourself the essence of limpness. Now open your eyes and try to remember why you’re doing this exercise. You can’t.
The end.

Night, San Francisco.

brian — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 08:02:02 +0000

I have been going like crazy- three dreamy spiral nights in a row at the Fillmore last weekend, reverberating with positive vibrations late into the early morning each night. I even stayed up all the way through to the sunrise on sunday morning. Sometimes the night is my playground, especially when I am in the city, and after the ceremony it all blends together.
Is there really much of a separation between the world and the ceremony? Yes and no. The world is the ceremony, and the world is disgusting, and the world is beautiful. It’s all true and it’s all false. The night gives me permission to live as a partly enfleshed half-cyborg phantom within the playground of paradox. (apparently you are a muse to me). human beings are monkey bars and slides and the gravel and sand pits that are alive and moving, and I get to run jump slide hang spit scream masturbate love hate dance sing be loved and be hated with them and within them and they respond to me. This has been the playground of my incorporation, unfolding, expanding, ripping, cradling, simultaneously.
I love this thing. Radiant unexpected abundance flushes out musty cob-webbed corners of my being I never knew existed but I see now have been there since the beginning of time, in all of us, and one bit more of my one little being thrown into the river of eternity, tasting of it, leaving those undiscovered corners the essence of clean, the exact way a thick flower petal feels between thumb and forefinger upon drying after a heavy rain. Plump, firm, watered, trembling with readiness spread wide for the sunlight. Almost bursting. Rainbow Raven. Essence of clean. Essence of life, earthquaking. Do you know that?
Rainbow Raven is alive, her story seed has been planted into the fertile garden ears of some willing souls. Mothering me, tantalizing me, weaving a tapestry out of me that only makes sense on the level that harmony makes sense, pulling subtlety out of a hat. Mystery presiding at the midnight marriage of magician and witch inside me, and the newlyweds hide in caverns during the day, allergic to sunlight, casting their rainbows out for all to see in the daylight, yet wonder where they came from. Invisible craftsmen, cackling in secret, disappearing the moment they are discovered, setting spells and transmuting the human canvas according to the unpredictable designs of their wedding master. Swirling. Manipulating everything that possibly exists with their bare hands; all is media, ripe, ready for digestion and excretion, transmutation.
MAKING IMPORTANT DECISIONS! to let things be as they are, despite the wills of Terrified, Love, Loved, Elated, Despondent, Judged, Death, and Peanut Butter, the characters in this unfolding melodrama.
In the face of it all, being, anyway.

How I Should Really Start Explaining Myself to Strangers

brian — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 01:53:24 +0000

I’m actually part ghost and part human.
I’m not exactly sure where I live.
You see, I’m made of the earth and I breathe of the sky,
and sometimes like warriors and maidens
they war with each other on my soul’s battlefield,
and I don’t care how much it hurts,
you’ll never take either one away from me.
I swim through the brackish waters,
where rainbows fornicate
with the pitch black of moonless nights in the forest.
Of course, everything softens in the moonlight,
especially a lover’s milk-red lips.
And in the desert, my brackish soul spreads out
like invisible wildfires into god’s mysterious wide open spaces.
In the strangest ways the vague and undeniable sentience
in the myriad faces of the desert landscape
always implores me to move forward,
but in no particular direction except around,
so all I can really do is raise up my hands inquisitively,
as if to say,
“Yeah, ok, and now what the fuck do you expect me to do with this?”
But as long as I’m alive,
there will never be a clear answer to that,
and then I have no choice but to fall in love.

The Land

brian — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:00:57 +0000

The land is the one
Who invites me to breathe
My fragrance into her,
Without asking anything in return.

She carves for me a spot
At her infinite table
And serves me a taste of
My own freedom, for breakfast.

In her heat I learn of my passion.
In her wind I learn of my strength.
In her cold stillness, I learn of my patience.
In her transformations, I learn of my origin.

In all of her seasons I am revealed,
Like a reflection in an infinite pool.
To breathe of her is to live,
To live of her is to love.

Bringing Back the Vision

brian — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:51:30 +0000

Like the guy learned in Into The Wild, human experiences want to be shared, if they are to have any purpose or life in the world. It simply won’t do to only experience Spirit for yourself and never share the experience with others, though it is important to learn how to be ok with experiencing Spirit by yourself. This is because every time we overshare with others about it, especially without having been invited to do so by the intuitive feel of the moment or conversation, we butcher a little bit of Spirit with our mangle of words.
This all occurred to me at the Dr. Dog concert, when I was looking around and realizing that my favorite shows are the ones where the audience is all having a great time together, as one. It’s perfectly great to just dance and rock out within a bond that is mostly or even strictly between oneself and the band, but isn’t it always even better to share the experience with your neighbors? Like after a particularly righteous jam, you’re jumping up and down hollerin’ and shoutin’ “WOOOO!,” and you want to give your neighbor a fuckin high five and jump up and down with ‘em, not just by yourself. You want to turn to your friend that you came with and go, “wow these guys are killing it right now!” or even just give each other a look that implies that. Shake the head and roll the eyes like “oh my god are you kidding me this is amazing!” Same goes for appreciating anything magical: a heroic athletic feat, a great story, a great poem, a moment of divine synchronicity in the wilderness, a painting, a person who is in the zone, a breathtaking sunset. Same goes for participating in and creating something magical by allowing magic to come through oneself: telling a story, capturing a wondrous sunrise on canvas, portraying a story on stage, being part of a team, making music, singing, writing. And truly, it doesn’t even need to be things like those listed above, which we usually esteem so highly: the magic is within everything, mundane, profane, and tiny, if we choose to look deep enough for it. As the poet says, “The wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass; / And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.” So while there is a place for experiencing things by oneself, part of the nature of raw experience is to eventually want to be shared, whether or not that sharing is in words, for there are so many ways for it to be shared in feeling as well. Sometimes it wants us to quiet down in simple and deep reverence, other times it asks us to ham it up and give ourselves to bombast. Most of the time it is way too big to begin to understand, but it sure feels good to listen to.
I think this is one of the ways, on an intuitive level, that we almost always bring our vision back to our people, whether we do it consciously or not. And everyone has a vision (roughly, a deep feeling of what we know to be true, as revealed to us intuitively by the divine within us) that is living and growing all the time, whether or not one has gone and quested for it in a formal ceremony or some other conscious undertaking, and whether or not they are conscious of its presence. For each one of us, our life experience up until now is informing our vision, which is informing everything we say and do, even if we never inquire about its nature or its whereabouts within us; even if we don’t know it exists. Having this vision is a necessary condition of existing, perhaps unfortunately. Many of us first-time vision questers, and many people at large, especially those who experience Truth deeply but haven’t learned to transcend the arbitrary restrictions of our very limited society-at-large, feel the urge to share our vision with our people so strongly that we blab about it with reckless abandon and do injury to it, by sharing it in contexts that aren’t ready for it, by planting its seed in arid clay soil that is not ready to receive it and nourish it. Better to keep that seed within us where we know the soil conditions, where we consciously nourish and tend for it as it sprouts into what will become of us. And of course, we do even that within the context of our people, and within the context of the human race, and within the context of this absurd and mysterious existence, because we are always here, always embodied, until we finally get to just join with the Mystery at death. No matter how much it might ever feel like it, on this Earth we are never alone. Our lives matter absolutely.
On a meta-level, the human urge to bring our vision forth on Earth exists so that we can bring a new, slightly more evolved version of ourselves to the world, and in so doing be of service by being ourselves. For me, if I live this way, it doesn’t so much guide the process of living my vision as much as it helps me recognize when I am in my own way, because I believe if I just listen to what is in my bones and my belly and my heart and follow what is revealed there in each moment, my vision will bring itself forward to my people, to my fellow humans, to this Mystery of an existence that we inhabit. This is at least partially contrary to having the mind direct the course of living the vision with plans and labels and boxes and images. True authenticity come through often looks like wildness, and certainly does not require predictability.
But the ability to live in this way more and more of the time takes cultivation and hard work, which seems to be getting more and more unpopular as people’s baser, and therefore easier, desires are more and more instantly gratified by technology, and consequently people’s frustration tolerance and resiliency decrease and decrease. However, I feel that there is a call to hard work inherent to our experience if our practice of listening is deep and consistent enough. Life will lead us to a new challenge and make it clear to us that it is the natural next step, either in the voices of mentors, elders, teachers, or neighbors, or in the strong voice inside our own mind, or the ache in our bones, or the gnawing in the pit of our belly, or the song in our heart, all of which refuse to die as long as the truth is ignored. We’ve all experienced this, and witnessed it in others, and we’ve all seen how easy it is for humans to try to shut these voices up, whether by fleeing from people who hold us accountable or fleeing from ourselves with all manner of distractions and numbing agents. We have become masters, especially in America, at inventing conventions, social habits, gluttonous behavior that mask and benumb the divine longings for growth that originate within the nature of our beings. Instead of getting rid of them we have only turned them into anxiety, a nagging sense of fear and heightened alert, paralyzing self-consciousness, and addiction to comfort, and then all the things that come from these persistent states of being, like violence, laziness, jealousy, depression, suicide, conditional love, comparison, etc.
That it is in our bones to be drawn by intuition toward the challenges that will grow us indicates that it is also in our bones to evolve, and violence and laziness and mindlessness are very devolved behaviors, on the lower end of what we are capable of as a species. Art, on the other hand, is on the higher end, unconditional love for all existence being at the highest. As we are naturally inclined toward evolution as a species, we as individuals are naturally inclined toward growing toward our own fruition, like the tree sending up its ever-expanding branches to catch the sun, in harmony with all the other different trees around it reaching for the same goal in different ways. How frequently we try to deny this inclination, even while thinking we are “doing something” that will make us grow! The tree doesn’t “think” about what it should “do,” it just is what it is, and it grows. Imagine what a tree would look like that refused to grow as it naturally was meant to: probably tangled, dense and confused. In one of my trainings I ran across the idea that humans are the only species on Earth capable of preventing their own blossoming.
Let us all pray to be ourselves enough that we answer the call when a fitting challenge is laid on our path for our growth. As the poet says, “the lute that brings forth beautiful music is of the same wood that was hollowed with knives”; there are times when we must be as the lute and let that Grandest of Luthiers hollow us with knives in his threshing hold, that we may bring forth even more beautiful music, for the furthered fruition of what we are capable of becoming as human, for our people, for the world, for this Existence. We may really just be here to propel the Melody forward, and who are we to get in its way?

One Prayer of Seven Voices

brian — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:15:47 +0000

Give me something I don’t understand,
So raw it compels me to ride
My drums like a horse
Until the sun comes up
And shines its light on my purpose.

Give me, in this one,
All-total and only moment,
Holiness,
And lead me to healing as
The water rises into my appetites.

We have come here with but one desire,
to EAT!, then exclaim,
“Yes! We didn’t miss it!”

Tell me with silence,
The language of my ancestors,
That the trees downstairs
Have the same raw stuff
That I do in my blood,
And pump Interbeing through my veins,
With an explosive surge of
Flooding liquid granite.

And in this one and wholly
Necessary moment, reveal to our bones
That the grass is no greener over there,
That we may arrive at Love,
Complete and undivided,
Right here,
Only now.

Mid-October, 2011 Journal

brian — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:28:50 +0000

I recently re-discovered this journal entry, which I wrote in mid-October. This was the first entry in a brand new journal, and also the first journal entry I had written since consciously choosing to face the seemingly enormous implications of my new responsibility to the world as a man on my own, without using other people or relationships (specifically one relationship) as crutches to help me carry it, which I had done for most of the first three months after my initiation on a vision quest in the Inyo Mountains. It was written during the time between two very powerful trainings I took at the School of Lost Borders, the first being a training in The Nature of Council.

Big teachings are coming to me in the last two weeks. In ways I feel that as I start this new journal, I start a new chapter/stage in my life. I hesitated writing the second part of that last sentence, as an anxiety rose in my chest thinking about what it means to start a new life stage. There is fear there. ‘What am I leaving behind?’ Now it dawns on me that it’s not so much a leaving behind as a changing of relationship to what has been so far. Old contracts broken and changed. That’s scary to me, for as much as I understand how those old contracts may hold me back from service, I have derived a sort of sick comfort knowing they are there, believing that I’m not alone, though these contracts truly kept me, true ME, from being discovered, kept me lost in enmeshment.
And so this new movement is an uncovering, a continued un-shrouding of who I am, and a renewed faith in what is revealed. There are some big, important questions that I had lost touch with. One teaching that came during the Nature of Council training is how ego-driven I’ve become in my unconscious movement to claim my power after having been bullied and belittled for so long. In that ego-driven place I lose touch with my sense of innocence, sense of service, surrender, imagination, love, peace, wonderment, acceptance. It is a fear place, fear of the forever-nebulous “not being good enough,” fear of my shadow, fear of pain, fear of, ultimately, death. And so by fearing all of those things, I live in my shadow, live in pain, walk as a dead soul, become paralyzed.
There is a return to some old familiar teachings for me right now, ones that I knew as a more innocent being, just from listening all the time as I was. And the one that sticks out is that the starting place for world-acceptance is self-acceptance, and the starting place for world-love is self-love, and that the starting place for love of others is self-love. There will never be an answer to the question “Am I good enough?” because there is no answer to that question. That question is made up. The universe does not issue us a yard-stick, never has and never will. Society’s yard-sticks are made up too, and we’ve all at least felt by now that they are false and empty and dangerous and shadowy.
So this is a movement back to listening, innocence, openness, service, love (self-love and therefore other-love, and therefore one-ness), and acceptance, of self, of truth, of others, of world. It is a movement away from fear, ego, envy, greed, comparison of self and other, judgment of self and other, and paralysis. It is a re-establishing of boundaries, the distinctions between myself and others, so that I may trust when I hear truth, as an independent hollow bone, open heart and mind. It is an asking of the question “What serves?” and an open listening. It is a surrender, and a return to gratitude. It is integrity.
I realize I need anchors to grow my ability to serve and maintain integrity. The discovery of a practice, the development of discipline in my life, these are intentions of mine. As one anchor, I have physically drawn a map, with all the things I might learn and do in my life, that I may consult in a time of questioning, so that I may continue to move and to serve. A commitment to intention is crucial, this is something I had lost. Why am I doing what I am? Am I in integrity? With myself, and not for the approval of others? Am I in service? Am I in love? And sometimes I won’t know, but discipline and a clear decision-making process will help me do my best more often, despite not knowing for certain; discipline and a decision-making process will cultivate listening and FEELING where I ought to show up next, though my rational mind may not “know.”
In the end, right now, it is a listening and a softening to the wisdom of the circle, the Wisdom of The Circle. Gratitude, love, integrity and faith, these are the lights of guidance always.

Move Me, Part 1

brian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:43:41 +0000

Move me.
I don’t much care how.
Just bring it on,
Like the red wine
Drips its slow molasses honeycoat
Over my windows of perception,
Resulting in a slow dance
With Time itself.
Or do it like
That girl across the room,
Who poured the magma
Through my eyes to light
The very flame
That licks my deepest recess.
Nudge me in the night
With the might of fifty steeds
Trampling through my dreams,
And play me like the grandest piano,
Tapping out your mystery
To an audience of everyone.
Or knock me down like Frazier,
But raise me up as the champ,
With nothing left in me but faith.

Service

brian — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:05:38 +0000

It has become apparent to me in the last year, as my life has realigned with a dedication to service, that it’s important to define for myself what I mean by service. The reason this is important is that I have spent so much of my life talking about service and what serves without actually doing it, because my ego has been hard to move out of the way. When I do this, it usually looks like a “holier than thou” attitude toward my fellow human, in which I’m chastising, judging or trying to control because I “know better” and I’m just going to shed the light for everyone else from my soapbox.

So one thing I’ve learned, in my practice, is that true service involves the dissolution of ego and honoring of the mysteries of my soul. I used to think that letting go of ego concerns would mean that I never spoke about myself or that I was always concerned with helping others and not being “needy” myself. However, what I’ve found is a little bit the opposite; when I feel my ego is truly out of the way, I can simply own my own experience without being attached to it, and allow others to have their own experience of the world, without judging or seeking to control. So it looks like, “X is just my experience, what is yours?” And once we have both shared that, it’s ok to just let it sit there and breathe! Like, “ok, here is your experience and here is mine, shared with integrity, and then… (big drum roll)… OK! Now to do the dishes,” instead of, “ok, here is your experience and here is mine, but wait, they’re different! We believe in different things! We have different preferences! Oh no!” I played that game for long enough, going around the world seeking only those people who have “things in common” with me; and actually, “things in common” with what my ego had decided it wanted to look like to the world, which is where the holier than thou originates from.

And I have compassion for myself around having done that and still doing it from time to time, because it comes from deep wounding. And at times it has felt like all my little wounded self wants is to feel connection with people, to feel seen and heard, to feel love and belonging. And I used to think that receiving love and belonging meant being around people with similar “goals” and “interests” and “values,” and being around people that agreed with me all the time. O how much suffering this brought me, and relational confusion when I tried to shape everyone into what I wanted them to be, which was like me!

I find the world very boring when everyone agrees all the time; it’s like the equivalent of the crops for which we have ruined the diversity of the gene pool through genetic modification. We are all incredibly diverse, within our own individual souls! but we often walk around like we could just reduce ourselves to some very limited, efficient, predictable set of labels. And then we actually pretend to “get to know each other” that way! “Ooh, you like sustainability? Me too! Let’s be friends.” And I say yes to that as a starting point, but yes even more so to starting points of disagreement and respect, and I say an absolute no to that as an endpoint instead of going deeper. I want to feel what is behind someone’s eyes when I look into them, and I want to know how clear and present those eyes are. You can see in someone’s eyes and hear in someone’s tone of voice if they have an ego agenda, and ego agenda is the anti-service. Let’s start the movement to stop genetically modifying our souls to be boring and understandable! Heirloom humans, those are the kind I like.

What I’ve come to discover is that the people who end up being closest to me, the people that make me feel the most seen and heard, the people who heal me, are the ones who simply see what I am and love it anyway. And I say “anyway” because I make mistakes, and I’m not perfect, and sometimes I hurt people, or do something irresponsible, and I’m not Buddha, and yet I am worthy of love because I exist, just like everything else. Kahlil Gibran says, “Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you.” Who am I to deny food to the hungry, even if I am the hungry, if I have some to give? And we all have some to give, always.

In this vein, I know that to the degree I show myself to the world, to that same degree I can accept love back from it. So I’ve decided, as a practice, to avoid limiting the expression of my truest self with dogmatic buzzwords masquerading as “values” and “beliefs.” Rather, I know that in order to truly serve, I must listen deeply, and listen deeply within the moment, which is all that exists. When I do that, my “values” show up in my eyes, in my voice, in my actions, in my body, in my words. And the Spirit guides them, and the wisdom of my ancestors deep within my bones guides them, and they don’t need or want buzzwords. At the end of the day, when we lay our individual heads on the pillow, the voice of our conscience is the way we answer to the gods and the universe, not to each other’s opinions.

So to remind myself of these things, needing as I am of a practice, by virtue of my human fallibilities, this little motto came to me the other day:
Attend your own existence as if every moment you spend with the truth of the present is as precious clean water you feed to the ever-new growth that is forever becoming your life’s masterpiece, without your planning. The gift is in the watering, which we do every time we soulfully accept Truth’s invitation, and show up fully to its eternal dance, with no expectations but to listen, and no agenda but to dance according to what we hear. The masterpiece that is yourself grows like a tree, which you will notice does not grow in a straight line towards a goal, an endpoint. Rather, its growth only involves exposing more and more of itself to the sun and the moon, and drinking in more and more of the ever-abundant Spirit in the ether. Be as the tall tree and do not act from hollow duty, but rather, as the poet says, “give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.”