The Unclad Soul

I want to run along the ocean and feel the waves wash over my feet erasing my footprints in the sand I want to skydive and sense myself falling watching the landscape below me seeing everything so clearly so cleanly until I love it all more than ever before I want to play guitar in an old bar and sing on a wooden stage with a drink at my feet making music that turns the crowd toward their dreams until all the hurts in the room melt in tears I want to write beautiful lines and put them in a book where the pages burn with longing and the reader sighs and blinks and walks toward a lost love until all of self is whole again I want to stand on a mountain ridge where the sun spreads light on slow moving cattle below where the Alfalfa smells sweet and the sky is a cloudless blue I want to ride a galloping horse in an open field until the air stings my eyes and I hear the pounding of the horse’s hooves and feel that floating that comes when you’re carried by forces beyond y...

Playwright and screenwriter, Robert Ardrey, once wrote, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Which is to say, our acts of benevolence, kindness, love and generosity transcend our acts of terror, barbarity, murder, and mayhem. The unimaginable carnage, cowardly and beyond any possible reason, carried out Sunday by Devin Kelley, takes us to our knees. We collapse under the weight of such a beastly crime. How does anyone human carry out such an inhuman atrocity? Details are murky. The answers we need and want, and what will finally be revealed, if any at all, will not be sufficient. Whatever the motive or mental defect may have been, all we will be left with is that the depths of our individual capacity for evil and harm know no limits. Monstrous crimes are not new. But what seems to be dramatically different these days is the frequency of them, so that they are becoming not an aberration but a common reality. There is without question a poiso...

There are secrets that are frozen In the deepest places of our soul. They cannot be unearthed, Yet they cannot be unknown. We have dreams that are lost In the recesses of our sleep. We have longings too deep to reach Across anxieties we cannot breach. There are spaces for love We hold for future opportunities. They are kept in the privacy Of our simple soulful duties. We have a heavy broken burden That we carry through the years. It’s a wistful painful memory Of our losses soaked in tears. There are questions we still can’t answer, Things we wearily want to know. But life is not an easy equation One can quickly solve and own. There are journeys alone to take And experiences with others to share. There are changes we have to make And realities we have to bear. And finally accept the mystery of things We cannot ever know. And find the hard fought truce within That if we honor lets us grow. © 2017 Timothy Moody

In my sleep, I was visited by a man in a flannel shirt with autumn colors in small squares. He wore a solid brown necktie unloosed at the collar. His hair was white and bushy, sort of like Einstein’s. He smoked a pipe and had the voice of Gandalf, Ian McKellen’s great character in The Lord of the Rings. There was nothing menacing or alarming about his presence. He spoke softly, quietly. His face was rugged and carried deep lines of age and wisdom.  His eyes, blue and intense, were nevertheless warm with soft light in them. He reminded me of my maternal grandfather whom I called Pop, a big loving man with a deep Southern drawl. I told the gentleman this and he said, “You can call me Pop if you want.” I said, “Ok.” “What troubles you?” he asked, as he put fresh tobacco in his pipe and lit it. It smelled of cherries or cloves or something sweet and delicious. “I wonder if I got it all wrong,” I said. “How so; got what wrong?” “People. Life. Meaning,” I said, a...

“If you have twelve crayons in your box, use your creativity and resourcefulness to make the best picture you can with these. Don’t spend your time worrying that someone else has forty-eight or sixty-four crayons. As you are, you are basically adequate to life.” ~ Laurence G. Boldt, ZEN and the Art of Making a Life

“By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.”  ~ Guy Gavriel Kay, Canadian Novelist

From the Desiderata by poet Max Erhmann – A line a day for the remaining Holiday season: “With all its shame, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

“Sometimes I dream that everything in the world is here, in my room,  in a great closet, named and orderly, and I am here too, in front of it,  hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness— and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing;  and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.”  ~ Mary Oliver, Poet/Writer

“I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.”  ―  Mary Oliver , American Poet

"There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail." ~ Robert Goolrick, Novelist

Joe DiMaggio “DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.”  ~ From historian David Halberstam’s book, Summer of '49

The world is broken. Split down the middle of its whole structure of existence. Civilization wobbles on cracked limbs leaving it basically immobile and infirm. The Ebola virus threatens West Africa and potentially all of us. The mulish ignorance and superstition, the wretched poverty and corruption of human life there invites indifference to all the simple protections against deadly diseases. The virus there spreads and kills because of human neglect, illiteracy, and obstinate religious cultism and bizarre myths. It destroys life because of the political indifference of the countries themselves and of the rest of the world toward them. Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan all remain locked in some horrendous blood bath that leaves the rest of us weary with it all. The politics and religious fanaticism involved in that mess of cultures is beyond any rational unraveling. The political corruption, the insane inhuman greed fed by these wars, the waste of life, theirs and of our soldiers, ...

“This is a record of your time. This is your movie. Live out your dreams and fantasies. Whisper questions to the Sphinx at night. Sit for hours at sidewalk cafes and drink with your heroes. Make pilgrimages. Look up and down. Believe in the unknown for it is there. Live in many places. Live with flowers and music and books and paintings and sculpture. Keep a record of your time. Learn to read well. Learn to listen and speak well. Know your country, know your world, know your history, know yourself. Take care of yourself physically and mentally. You owe it to your-self. Be good to those around you. And do all of these things with passion. Give all that you can. Remember, Life is short and Death is long.” —Fritz Shoulder, Native American Artist