Halloween - The Kingdom of Witches.

(A treat! This video is a little old, but I think it's brilliant!)


Halloween Facts:

• Most of us don’t think of Halloween as a religious holiday, but it’s rooted in Celtic (holiday of Samhain), Catholic (All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day), Roman (festival of Feralia) and folk European rituals and traditions.

• Ancient Celts lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward off the spirits of the dead, who were believed to return to Earth on Halloween.

• Halloween began to lose its religious connotations in the 19th century, becoming more of a kid's holiday.

• Today we celebrate Halloween with costumes and candy.  

As nights grow longer and the sweltering sun subsides, I think about bonfires and nature trails and sleeping under the stars. 

I won’t be camping this year.  But I do have my costume ready!

Happy Halloween!

What lies

What lies behind us and lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The farthest coast of Neptune

I cut it because the butterfly in my throat doesn’t fly anymore. It has broken wings so it flutters but doesn’t soar. I painted one on my ribs. It has two wings, none broken and soars higher than the moons of Saturn. It brings gifts from the farthest coast of Neptune.
What about you—why’d you cut your hair?
Well they say that these procedures are by no means torture. But they lie. The day they did it, my legs were a mess and my hair was gathered in a ball at the base of my neck. But none of it was enough to distract from all of the chaos in me.

Paramount Pictures

Last night I watched Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the open courtyard of the Vizcaya Estate accompanied by live organ music, courtesy of organist Karl Cole.

The film, the live organ music, the full moon above us, the monumental stone structure, the cool courtyard, the eyeball in my cocktail, my purple orchid, the gardens after dark, the lights in the trees, the marble statues, my hand in his as we strolled the garden maze…I was enchanted with it all!

Then I stumbled. He worried about my ankle, which was fine, really.
But I limped a little anyway ;-)

September

On a warm September morning I found a ladybug in my shoe. It was a black flamenco heel with an ankle strap. Later I found her on my bedroom window sill, camouflaged by the wood. The following morning I found her sprawled out under a beam of sunlight on my bed. What the hell? Now we’re sleeping together?
These things happen, she said.

Elevations

Dear Otis,
I’m in no mood for work today. Take me to the moon instead!


The doors open on the third floor. Cars,
no craters. This moon looks like a parking garage at sunrise.

Otis, we need to talk about your directional sense.

....................

Do you feel this balcony overlooking the bay 
or its steel bars?

Would you strike a match, light a Parliament, 
sit beside me in a plastic chair, inhale my smoky hair?

Equations

It’s cramped in here,
all small.  Yet they tell me
it’s infinitely large.  

I alone contain over 12,000 days.  We require space. 
6,000 days ago I must’ve been smaller. 
I attended a cramped concert and fit just fine. 
My clothes are the same.  My insides,
expanding.  They tell me I arrived
12,775 sunsets ago.  Yet I’ve not arrived
at all. I must be traveling very
slow.  In my beginning
I swam across the Atlantic in 12 hours. 

I believed myself arrived.
Until I had to swim back. 

I must be saving the first page
for brilliance. 

His face in the shade
over the concave reminds me of Spain. 

My legs are burning.

2010

I went to the eye doctor for the first time the day the world ended.  I got glasses, pink ones, with Smurfette on the case.  

I never saw it coming.  There were no broadcasts.  And I had not yet learned how to read the stars.  I remember the aftermath, that silent space in the grave where tiny rays of light creeped through.  But I hardly remember being reborn.  It’s ironic that the world ended the first day I saw straight.  But that’s how it happened.

I cried at the second world’s end.  That one, I saw coming.  I wasn’t wearing my glasses.  But a million broadcasts had invaded my every sense.  I forget the particulars, but I remember it was planned and forced.  I consulted the stars and chose the date down to the hour.  Still, once it was launched it spread like the swells on her face.  And there was little I could do to contain it.  

The last apocalypse happened on Valentine’s Day.  I’d painted charts like a cave animal and acquired what I called skills.  I’d seen it coming since the previous Easter when we’d missed church and had no eggs.  I scanned the bathroom floor with my fingertips for a Toric lens I’d lost in the mayhem.  That rebirth had me twisted in stirrups, imploring the heavens and pleading for the end.  

My life is a bird that emerged from a lost, convoluted cocoon that drowned back in the age of the dinosaurs.  I taught myself how to see and hear and touch and smile and laugh and breathe.  I taught myself how to dance.  I stood on the edge of a primitive sea, gazed out into a thousand faces, closed my eyes and silenced them all.  I traveled beyond the walls into my own sanctum, where I danced on some crowded stage, alone.

I learned in fifth-grade science that worlds die and are reborn endlessly.  But all of those other apocalypses mean nothing to me.  I’m a frail, self-absorbed creature, and the only end I’ve ever known is my own. 

They tell me the world is ending.  “Yes,” is all I ever say.  Aren’t we all?

Beyond the island

During experiments conducted in 2005,
scientists created element 118.

If you and I were to evolve past this plane of visibility and fuse like calcium and californium, would we be at all like element 118?

As soon as it’s created, element 118 begins to decay.
Just like us. Only it’s dead in less than a millisecond.
Does a lifetime happen in a millisecond?

Scientists have been searching for the island of stability since the 1960’s.
Because we all want to be immortal. The isotopes that live on the island are whole.
They’ve evolved past our fleeting world of confines and into the infinite.
And we all want to be infinite.

When we find the fabled isle, we’ll be carried away like protons
beyond this highly unstable sea.
But we'll all have to decay to get there.

Love for fall

Leaves don’t change color in Miami, but you can still feel fall.  This morning, ducks near the lake where I live stood on the edge in silent meditation.  It's the arrival of my favorite month.  

Welcome, October.