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Wild Thing

Wild bird on the wing,
Where does your spirit fly?
Lift on your great wings
No longer bound by the weight
Of your body and its duties.
Be mine wild bird.
Let my love
Set you free.
So soar,
For they are calling you,
As you are calling them.
The beauty in you,
The voice of your wonder,
The drum of your heart
Is their music.
And their song is the wind
Flowing over feathers,
Lifting and carrying.
They sing to you as you sing to them.
Hear it and respond.
Stand on the hill and let your being
Flow to them.
Open your wings and fly.

Why Do I Love You?

Because there were days before I even met you when I missed you.

Have you ever felt like that? Gripped by a longing you cannot place anywhere? Looking for a face you cannot find; and a hand that fits yours, and someone who wants you as much as you want them?

And I know we wanted each other.

Because when we first met we danced. That was such joy, to move together like that; to tell our story to each other through movement, through eyes meeting, and through open mouthed pleasure. So much clearer than words. So much in a glance, or in a quick touch and tumbled bodies, and the silent standing and knowing.

Because wonders happened. We have a real Christmas time of wonders. And I hear people say, “Things like that have never happened to me.” Then I feel the blessings run through us, as expanses of wonders open to my gaze, and I want to drop some of them into peoples lives who they have, “never happened to.”

I like to think such stardust is infectious. So I sprinkle it around me. I drop some into everything I do, smiling as I wonder if the person who eats the bread or reads the story will know where the bubbling, smiling stream in them came from.

I especially love to trickle it through my eyes to the children I pass. They are so quick to catch it.

Because we played, we flew, we exulted in each other. What I remember is being then in the first day of things, in the garden of innocence, where guilt, or sorrow, time or distance hadn’t ever invaded. I never saw them with us in that place, and we never invited them in. People don’t live in that new day of things — not many– so you can’t tell them. Well, you can try, but something tells me they will think you are lying or covering up what they call “the truth”.

Because of the splendour of loving like that. Because of the totality of it. I was made whole. It was shocking, wonderful, even painful at times to be so everything, so all at once. That was how we came to be married, because one and one don’t make two in that condition — they make one.

And there was the ending of things, and the beginning of things, all at the same time. Life is like that at the peak — Alpha and Omega together. Kaligrowlf. And the ripples of that are still moving across the waters of our lives. Endings and beginnings.

Because yesterday was a lifetime away. There was a cusp, maybe like you see on the moon, where there is a distinct line, one side of which is light and the other night.

So it was with me. Before that cusp you were only in my life as intuitions, as disembodied voices. I knew I was waiting, but I didn’t know how long, or even if you would come. Then suddenly I crossed the line of the cusp and you were with me, as you were with me today. Warm, real, laughing, troubled, everything.

So yesterday is a lifetime away, and it is recognised how difficult it is to remember past lives.

Because you and I dream dreams, and people them with our creations. We build and form things in that place people call imagination. But the way they use the word they make it sound like an unreal pastime. But our dreams bring things to life, make dwellings and doorways, possibilities and futures. Haven’t we had a child and built a dwelling?

Because we love each other. Yes that is a strange word — love. What does it mean? Does it mean we feel emotions for each other? Well, yes! But it’s not just that. Does it mean we want to share with each other, to talk, to make love, tell secrets and share confidences, give meaningful things, share a bath, call, give time to? Yes, yes, but there’s more.

There are strange things like the fact that however far away you are, I feel as if you are near. Like the completely irrational sense I have that we are sharing life, though thousands of miles separate us. That love which in me lives like a beacon of your existence, a positioning star guiding us both to some harbour I now trust we shall reach yet have never seen.

My darling – I will meet you there – as I promised I would meet you here.

That is love.

Walk Gently With My Heart

I hold in my hands and heart
Something so precious
Yet in some ways so common
One might take no more
Notice of it
Than a sparrow flying by.
And here it is again,
Another morning
When I wake from sleep
Feeling myself
In a great forest,
Walking amongst
The ancient trees,
Hearing no sound
And sensing the movement
Of no living thing
Except myself
And the trees.
So I stand
In that quiet,
Tendering the precious thing,
Anxious that some
Clumsy move
Arising from my
Ineptness,
Might spill
From out my heart and hand
What is most dear.
So I walk gently
Among the silent trees.

The Wonderful Game

Well, sweet heart, here we are again, today.
How many times have we arrived here?
How many different ways have we lived today?
Twenty six thousand times for me.
How many for you?
And what grand drama
Are we part of in our todays?
How many more to live through?
I wonder sometimes about a key.
I’m sure I have it somewhere,
As I have often opened a door
To the beginning of things,
When it was the first day – every day,
The day of Creation,
When I and all the creatures
Are known to each other
In that glorious dance.

And the song,
So much to sing
And I, starting so frail.
But that is part of my song,
The pain and strength in frailty.
The struggle, like any runt,
To get enough,
To stand amongst those
Heavier and stronger.
Or even to grow with less leaves
Held to the sun.

Runts have big eyes though,
And look in the shadows
Where events have pushed them,
Seeing, if they dare, strange dreams,
Grand visions of forces moving human life.
Like the invisible wind,
Powers push and guide us,
While many, hands full of grasping,
Rush to the next hill to stand upon,
Or beat their drum to draw attention,
And fail to look up, or down, or in.

Therefore I sing of grand vistas,
Of unacknowledged shadows
Haunting people and damaging children.
I sing the song of ancestors,
Of the hidden treasures
Deep in the ocean of sleep,
Or even there in the shallows
Of daily experience,
If only we would reach for them.

But the grand chorus is of Life.
Not the life of work or human love.
I sing the formless mystery behind,
Above, within, outside;
Forever not the same;
Always laughingly moving
Even as it touches us
It hides and bids us chase.
And I, loving it,
Am ever finding and failing
In that wonderful game.

Walking the Sacred Circle

In the circle
Beginning and End
Are forever together.
The beginning is an end,
And the end a beginning.
Everywhere is darkness and cold.
Everywhere is light and joy.
That is life as we
Walk the Sacred Circle.
And the circle we walk,
The Black Road,
The Rough Track of Trials,
Joins the Path of White,
As Winter joins Spring.
And that Is the Circle —
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter,
Birth, youth, maturity, death.
Sunrise, sunset, sunrise.
World upon world
Dancing the Sacred Circle,
And we dance
Life to Death,
Death to Life
In the Great Circle –
All spinning
From the emptiness
Of the Centre

The Rough Track

While I was walking home one day
A stranger spoke as I passed by.
He said to me in quiet tones
Have no fear of the rough track.
The path you take
With the woman you love
Leads on through broken ground,
And though that’s hard,
The going tough,
There’s still joy to be found.
For broken ground
Lets new seeds grow,
Lets grand lessons be learned –
Allows you both
New pathways tread,
Gather harvests you have earned.

The Eternal Wound

This is the time of prayer,
When I, upon this rocky path
Cry out for light to see my way.
And in the gloom that
Glorious presence
Stands beside me and speaks.

The voice is as the core of me,
Revealing by drawing back
The curtains of my mind,
Till I see vistas
Of ancient times and landscapes,
Until now hidden.

And there it is – my history.
And mine is yours my love;
Yours and ours all.
For this is what I have
Fought against
These years –
This revealing – this pain.

Yes – the heart in pain.
The wound that never heals.
The reminder of what
I had chosen to forget
That I now face.
And facing recall the warnings
Of this time of dissolution.

Dear God – the struggle!
How long has it been?
A thousand, or ten,
That I pitted my will
Against Yours?
And here, in this life,
The struggle has centred,
Has been fought around
The wonder, the agony,
Of love and sex.

For now, as the curtains
Draw back upon the past,
I see that mighty struggle
When God – for that is
What in today’s world
We have named that
Wonder within ourselves
That informs our lives –
Saw fit to wash
Away our sordid past
So we could start anew.

But some of us
Were initiates of that Most High.
And for what we felt
As common good
Opposed that deluge.
We knew the promised flood
Was arising out of our
Dealings with the Universal Good.
But to oppose it
We made a rule
That would put
A mind force into operation.
“Nought shall happen
That man does not will.”

And so we bound each other
To a mighty oath to
Stretch through time.
Each of us shall
Live this force,
And thereby set in motion
Energies to reach into
The very structure of
People’s lives,
And turn the tide
Of Cosmic Will.

Yes, the history
Of human lives
Was changed.
And yes, there was
The beginning
Of Devil worship.
For we objectified
A disharmony
Between the individual will
And that of the Divine in us.

We were the Mighty Ones
And live amongst
You still today.
Here within Earth’s peoples
We still carry the Mark
Of our endeavour –
The stab wound in the heart.
One petal torn from
The symmetry of perfection.

In the arena of the past
We fought with God,
And won that battle.
But in the winning lost –
And fell wounded.

Today that struggle
Still lives within this body.
The fight between
My will
And my surrender.

The path is not easy.
Love itself is a rose
With tearing thorns;
An arena where
I the gladiator
Fight the battle to survive.
Yet in that battle,
Slowly come to know
The Sacred Love.
And that Love tells me
That all who look
Upon this face
Will know
The path that I have trod.

Remembering

Today I realised how much I have remembered.

I had paused, wondering what the years had brought, and piece by piece I recalled the many moments when my life came back to me.

Yet I had never realised I had forgotten who I was.

And as I held the pieces in my awareness I began to put them into order, for they had come to me like parts of a puzzle, quite out of sequence.

The first piece?

Well, my beginnings, the start of the story, has its first page before my own awareness of existing. None of us emerge from a vacuum do we? There is always someone or something that precedes us, without which we would not have emerged.

When that first sentence of my story came back to me it wrenched my heart to realise how much I have forgotten, and how much had been given to me unawares.

“In the beginning”… Those were the first words. They rose in my being as the knowledge of a huge ocean of awareness. Huge yet filling no space. Forever, yet consuming no time. And in the solvent of that ocean, a whole universe, with all its life and drama, was dissolved into the One. One, without another, alone. And in that aloneness a seething creative longing for others. For One, alone, could not be Two. So that great summary of uncountable lives and experience became the architect, the grand designer of its own death. A death to provide the opportunity for others to exist. Then, tearing asunder its being in the grandest of explosions, it fragmented into the particles of time, space, and opportunity.

And even now, as I remember this, I call out to my dead parent who left the seed of me in this universe, “My Darling! I love You!”

A seed! Well, more to the point a potential of my existence somewhere in time and space. But there was an immeasurable time when there was no focus to bring awareness of myself. And that was my next memory – things moving, acting, processing – each with its own intention – each with its own direction and quality.

Time and time and time, passing while things Became.

Yes, became – Something.

When that memory came I called myself the Swimmer. Unknown even to myself, I moved to music I did not hear, to a sea I did not know. Each movement a beat, each swift turn a passage in the flow of Life.

And that was the miracle we all share in our genesis. The tiny swimmer beating its tail, the egg floating in the primordial fluids.

As Life I have been the one note playing over and over, on and on until I found the next note, the next possibility, the next talent in dealing with the environment. That was how I had become the swimmer in the ancient waters.

On and on, emerging out of myself into different forms, different behaviours. But all the time holding in me the most primitive and the blazing possibility given by my Darling Love. Constantly unfolding.

Those memories were hard. The safe shell of my rough crafted identity was torn open again and again. The womb of my understanding was ripped in giving birth to the enormity of my past. The apparently solid ground of my beliefs, of what my elders had taught me to believe, was sundered by the earthquakes of immense slabs of memory bursting to the surface. The earth flowed like a river. The world of my life was changed for ever.

And the upswell of that deep interior self brought into remembrance great primeval fossils of experience that on surfacing gained renewed life in me. For I, like all else, grew from the soil of past life. My roots feed on the deep underground remains of past times, ancient peoples or behaviours, crumbled temples, loves and conflicts. And those same roots now feed on that past and lift it, forming today’s leaves and flowers.

So it was I knew again the still breath-less mind of the snake and lizard. I felt once more the soul of the howling wolf, in whose crying all feeling is submerged. I called as the moose and bear, bellowing my existence, shouting my strengths in glorious being. I remembered guarding my eggs, or giving my tits in panting satisfaction to my cubs. And as the animal I roared and mated, hunted and slept, learning the wisdom gathered over the millions of years till I, as Life, became man.

But first I met the cusp, the point of change. The memory of it came upon me one evening. My being, as dusk fell, slipped into that past, felt again the animal man the Life that lit me now once had been. And as that predecessor I crouched at the mouth of a cave, guarding, blowing out sound to tell the pack all was well, and to affirm the newness of the man in me – the strange knowing of self, like some peculiar creature that had possessed me and shaken me, the animal, awake – awake for the first time.

Then in silence this emergent selfhood lived in the world of sound – sounds of the night – sounds in every dimension and distance – sounds experienced living in space in such a way that I, the remember, have never heard before.

But suddenly one of the sounds suggested threat, and all the new knowing of self was lost in the re-emergence of the animal instinctive roar. That was the night watch.

The world and all things were fresh then. For we looked at all with the new-found self-awareness. Life had never seen the Earth through those eyes before, and there was so much wonder. I too, in those buried strata of myself, had walked into the cave and seen my woman with a baby in her arms. Seeing it for the first time, and fallen on my knees before her in awe and with tears. For there before me was a goddess of creation.

In that same way I knew all the races. I danced and shouted power as the black race. I stood over the animal trails as the red race, remembering their wisdom of the hunt and dream. I sat in the mystery of knowing the void as the yellow race, and discovered the torture and madness of the white. I am a river that flowed through all time, knowing life from the beginning, in all forms – plant, animal, human, male and female.

And today, after all that, here I stand, the sum total of an incredible journey, looking out the window of my small house. I see the jackdaws flying across the still green trees as I eat my breakfast. I scrawl these words to remind myself of that long life we have all lived, and which I have had the pain and privilege of remembering, and in great peace ask the question – What next?

On the Beach

Forever standing on the edge of that great ocean,
Its waves washing over and through me,
As the rising and falling tides of breath.
My dim vision catching only glimpses
Of this sea of life
As it stretches away
From what I know of my fingers,
The longings of my blood
And the beating of my heart.
Here on the threshold of its depths
I see the tiny lives in their billions
That support my own existence.
Across the waves of rising falling life
With sentience I touch
The unknown depths of what I am.
It whispers to me its secrets
As I with hushed breath
Listen to its surf
Pounding in my ears and chest.
Standing ever on the edge
Of that vast territory of life
Of which we all
Live only on the beach.

Ocean Meeting

I stood, at the dawning of the year, looking over the ocean, at that place where the trees come almost to the water’s edge. Rocks thrust up among the trees, creating a small cove in which one can be quiet and listen to the earth and sky. And as I stood a movement called my eyes to see a woman waiting where the trees met the shore. She watched me as if expecting me to know her. And I asked her forward to stand before me closer. She came, looking directly into my eyes; a full woman, proud, and confident.

In that way we stood appraising each other, and I saw upon her the marks life leaves when it fades, as at the ending of a year. “I see you are one of those who have already died,” I said. “And yet you live, but only by the power of the spirit, resurrecting you from that dark night.”

She smiled and stood a little closer, putting her hand on my arm until I took it in mine. “This is the way of things at this time,” I continued. “For many of us must die this death, to be reborn, that the spirit may flow more fully into the life of the earth.” And we embraced and stood looking across the ocean.

No Wind Today

No wind today again.
Nothing fluttering the boughs of trees
Shaking the leaves and limbs
Into the ever changing geometry
Of suggestive shapes
For my mind to paint with.
No wind today.
Nothing to ruffle
The waters of the lake
Or take me laughing
Down the road
In its grasp.
No wind about me
Wrapping its touch
Around my bare limbs,
Or carrying smells to me
From strange distances.
Only now the quiet
Falling of rain
In the stillness
Of this solitary place.

My Woman

You are my woman.
And because this
Small man has been ennobled
By the generations of men,
I see in you
All manner of women.
Through you beloved
Shines the essence.
Here is the woman
Who from love faces dangers
To be with her man.
For you are the mystery
Of women who love
Makes bold.
You are the tender heart,
The eager smile,
The ancient wisdom
Women have gathered
Through love
And the suffering of its absence.
Did you not tell me
Our love is more
Than our little selves?
And here I am
Filled with the strength
Of the past,
Looking at you,
Hearing your voice,
And knowing you as WOMAN.
And here we live
That ancient and
Wonderful story
Telling itself anew
As this man and this woman
Unfolding
The love that is life.
Revealing again
The common wonder
Of you and I In love.

My Dream

I dreamt that we two souls
Joined as one,
Took flight
Into the sky of possibilities.
With joyous abandon
We dived, as spirits might,
Into the boundless heavens.
Naked we leapt
Into the Sea of Wonder.
Shape upon shape we took,
Playing as gods might,
Beyond the limitations
Of small hopes,
Shining and sparkling
With glories.

Love Is

Love is bigger than the ocean.
Love is wider than the sky.
Life is full of ancient wonder.
Love is more than meets the eye.

Moon Woman

Moon that you are to me,
You call the tides
Of my heart and mind,
Racing the stream
Of my emotions
Over the river bed
Of my longing
Into the falling rain
Of my tears.

You are the light
In the darkness
Of my aloneness,
Moon woman –
The lantern
For the night
Of my dreams
Shines on me.

Walking in your light
I travel old paths
Hearing the owls calling
And the trees speaking to me.
The ancient ones
Are shades around me,
And you and I
Are together.

Moments

There are some moments we never forget however long we live. And that time with you is one of them.

We walked out of the hotel as dusk was gently shrouding the trees and the bay road, and we walked onto the pier stretching from Berekeley into San Francisco Bay. You were carrying an Indian blanket you treasured, and I couldn’t think why we would need it on the pier, except perhaps against the wind. You led me to the furthest point and we watched the deep water move under the pilings, and you bubbled with memories of childhood times spent out here in the bay.

Slowly we walked back, stopping to look at the lights across the water, and to ask some youths with their rods hung over the Pier, if they had caught anything for their supper.

Then, further on as I was leaning on the rails watching the night, you threw the blanket around me, with you under it, clinging to me from behind. And I can still feel it — the holy feeling in my chest and throat — the sudden wetness in my eyes with the salty water burning. Your breasts and body were warm against me. But stronger even than that was the sensation, the awareness, of your delight. You were a child, brimming with pleasure at how you had wrapped us together in this exquisite intimacy; shut away from the world in our own private place. You were a woman with glad sparkling eyes holding me so tenderly, telling me how precious I am to you.

And so I love you very much my tender Californian woman, my wonderful bright eyed child. I love you for giving me such treasures that I carry with me always, and only unwrap to look upon in special moments when I can bear your absence.

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Tony Crisp