march snow. a month long cold.too much rat poison in my system. enervated,weak,little sleep dead cousin step brother i've never missed a family wake/funeral.a first time for everything. waiting to give my heart a jump start.waiting to drive to nova scotia waiting to see an old friend one last time. off the 4 or five martini a day routine. I am and I am not who I've been. This is it for the time being. Stirrings on the sky side of the grass by country bubba aka honkey hollywood aka the prophet of possibility.

soulsearching

April cruel? No. fleeting, the end is the beginning.
The early bloomers are dispatched by the sudden shower and the accompanying wind.
The redbuds reign as they gain a purple violet hue
and frame the dogwoods as they emerge.
Just sitting in the warming sun is delightful.
Soon the weeds and multiflora will have the upper hand.
Already the garlic mustard is taking over.

Why am I searching for lost loves?
Is it my lost selves I am searching for?
Do I still see myself in others and others in me?
I used to be a prophet of possibility.
By the nineties we will have gained a loving new world
that we helped create. It is now 2006 and the world is teetering.

What will I find if I recover my lost loves?
What do I mean by loves?
I am not searching for old lovers.
I am looking to recover what is beyond the corporeal.
Some misplaced essence, or conviction.

It is not the almost mystic happening
I almost experienced half asleep in the chapel
as the sun shone through the stained glass window.
It is not making love down by the creek
as a swarm of bees darkenened the sunlight.

It is not the butterfly resting on my sweaty belly
as I pause from moving rocks away from the bank
and sit on a folding chair in the creek.

Nor is it seeing my thirdborn son
minutes after he is born still bloody.

It is not that moment when my new daughter sits
in the full moonlight and makes artificial sounds of water falling
her frightened face uplifted on the verge of tears.
Was she remembering a time in the orphanage
when she was punished for failing to pee
after awakening a grouchy attendant.

Nor was it my Tom Sawyer son conning others
on the stage to whitewash the picket fence.

I began to know what love is from the inside
when my wife came home from the hospital
stomach embroidered in a new way
after they cut the cancer out
and I could let her know how beautiful she was
and how I loved her.

Was it the moment I was sitting in a chair after a walk in the fields
and my hip hurt and the white cat ,honky, jumped into my lap
and jumped right off, eyes wild ,hair high
and I jumped up as well and limped away like my mother used to
feeling my mother in me departing
now finally leaving this earth
a year's turning after she died on my birthday.

It is all of these and other ordinary encounters at work
or in bars listening to jazz with Phebe.
It is walking down to drop and add with a fistful of slips
I have signed and skirting the lines to find
Mrs Murphy to accept these changes.

It was hidden moments behind closed doors in the smokefilled board room
where I was brazen enough to raise questions
and challenge new directions by new leaders.

And a thousand other moments when I said no
because I could ,or yes
or whenI let someone pause a minute
to find their way again
A temporary safe harbor.

It was also times when I was shunned
because people believed what they wanted to about me
only to find out differently down the line.

It was also the time I walked out of the Catholic Church
in Mtown one final time and walked across the street to the Baptist Church
where I read and Death shall have no dominion
from the choir loft on Easter morning.

It was coming face to face with with human failure:
The Baptist minister and the young deaconess
and what was really happening at The Paris Peace talks
It was meeting an exhausted Saul Alinsky in his last year
at our Conference on Community Organization.
It was seeing a tired Paulo Freire on a Sunday morning at Penn
in a room still littered with pocorn and debris from a movie the night before.

It was all those Summers at Bucknell with Ernie
and learning with the STEP students.
It is all those things and more.

soulsearching
Today I'm gonna let my class go a little early and head to South Philly to see the Phillies. A friend from the old workplace sent a ticket to me via Phebe. I've been dragging the last few days, really aching, maybe chills and a fever,had to take a nap when I got back home TUESDAY. This morning I was honkey hollywooding down the path feeling like I used to 3o years age. I don't know why, but I like it. Got 18 out of a possible 20 readin' and writing about Louise Erdrich's Red Convertible. The other class is clicking too;even my music man James Taylor is starting to come to class and submit essays. He told me he wasn't coming back next year; his band is going on the road. First gig in California, but he told me he was gonna finish the semester and earn the credit anyway. I'd already decided to cut back to one class next year,and I still think I will but it was a jolt of good juice. I still intend to cut back;otherwise I'll be cutting corners with them or myself somewhere along the line...Dreams are wierder than ever after not dreaming for a long while...The classroom is quiet because they are writing and thinking. Ok, I can deal with that, but I miss the give and take and the openness of several summer classes In Lberg and many evening classes in the city of brotherly...Last night was a dream about the old work place brought on by a departmental election and Phebe bringing me the vote for my candiate spiels I reviewed my last dozen or so years there after I decided to get back to teaching only and leave the Deaning behind. I do not want to dream that dream again. What grace giving awareness have I learned from those painful days? One thing gnaws at me. I did not know a dear friend is dying of lung cancer. Phebe says she has signed my name to a couple of cards. Pat was a good friend. We acted in plays together. I scripted a piece that we used as a springbord into a play Called I want you to Say..We called ourselves The Bonegas,which means,I think ,Cow pies in Spanish. We did dramatic readings on Death and Dying. We did something called Something Rich and Strange. She played Caliban, I played Prospero. In th ebeginning we were colleagues,then she left for a year or two and then came back at which time I was The Division Director who played a role in hiring her. We worked on on I want you to Say through the Spring and Summer, and it was good. After the play Phebe said to me:you son of a bitch, you stole my play". I know she resented the time I had spent with Pat and Adele and Daphne and Dennis. Ned was there too. I decided to curtail my dramatic activities as a kind of an act of love. ..Pat was a co;owner of a Motel in Barnegat Light. We stayed there one year, and other years we were in the area, I would stop by and visit with Pat. She is a warm loving entity within me. I want to see her in the near future.

soulsearching
Sprang sprangsprungSPRING reading tom mooreCare of the Soul. about ritual,the importance of not forgetting. We all forget. The magic is we often remember in time not to drown. Spring and Fall do it to me. And writing something down, a minute before reading almost exactly what I wrote in a book opened at random,YES... I'm nowhere near as driven as tommy moore, but we share a similar grounding in liturgy and ritual and leaving it all behind, yet taking it with us forever. Wife is doing a Sadir with a friend she had not seen for 30 years until we went to brunch together a week ago. Our thinking about ritual coincided with my soul searching and my being steeped in Papist catholicity. This reflective dimension and autocthony(can't find it in my old dictionary, but its heideggerian, means rootedness,hereI mean it in a spiritual, dare I say, soulful sense) help me get through the days and part of the nights...I always preferred students who had some roadwear; the ones who sit in my classroom these days give new meaning to "callow Youths". The stretch my credulity and test my resilience. I know I have something to say, I know what I want them to say, but they must own it before they say it. They must seek answers within themselves by dealving deeply into themselves and moving beyond the limits they have allowed to grow around them. As I must. Ritual, liturgy ,the renewal of Spring, the dying of the light, the birthing of the light, the remembering what we have forgotten or have chosen to forget. Perhaps now I can face the day, walk with my wife and dog and others who have joined a small prayerful walk for peace in a tiny town. We started on a winter day, winds blowing noses leaking. Today it is April and growing.

soulsearching

This morning out the kitchen window was a star magnolia in front of a froth of willow.

Later in the day after a date with the taxman who is obsolite
the dog anD I went to the barn via the field he ran across to flush a big blue heron.

Sable Cat doing her stations of the cat,rolling on the adirondak rocker
me scratching her belly,she scratching my hand a bit.

birds sing their love louder than Bakeowski.

SPRING!!!

soulsearching Today I got a new list of people I want to read DavidHor(r0r)witz published a list of the 101 most dangerous professors in U.S. Many of them are on the wrong side of his Israili favoring position; one in particular caught my eye. A diminutive teacher at Erlham College who teaches Peace Studies. How subversive at a Quaker school! I thank the nasty old man for publishing his enemies list! I was beginning to worry about the 50 years' gap between myself and my students as I extend my teaching by being an adjunct. He has given new meaning to my work! I will continue to goad and cajole and dare my students to think in this world gone askew. Who would have it any other way. As my new found confidant Kierkegaard was wont to say it is important for us to regain our indivduality against the overwhelming onslaught of societal institutions which seek to reduce us to a compliant mass(or something like that)

soulsearchingSt Paddy's Day. Everybody's Irish. My Irish sister called to wish me top of the mornin'. Apparently my father used to talk with a brogue when he was tipsy, so my mother always freaked out when I would lapse into a brogue. One of my son's brogues when he's three sheets to the wind. Jansenistic Irish were big on mea culpa. Perhaps that is why my soul was so black during my childhood-teen age years...Oh they had great stories such as: Extra Ecclessia nullus salus= outside the church there is no salvation; this lead to it was a mortal sin to darken the doors of a Protestant church. And so on a Sunday afternoon when my sister and I entered the chapel of Trinity College we were at Hell's gates. I don't believe I ever confessed that sin. Perhaps the priest would have straightened me out. Fear was big and ugly and in all dark places, lurking behind a door drifting along with an impure thought...I remember a St Patrick's day which stretched into St Joseph's day when I was in Turkey. Magnums, and Jerryboms of champagne, and a protestant girl missionary who came home with me and bundled ,but we did not fuck. Before she left, she hung my trousers from the top bureau drawer, and took the cuff links out of my french cuffs. Left the change on the bureau along with the keys and went about God's good work among the heathen.