Little Notes on Crisis Karma
Where darkness falls, are we to turn off the inner light and shuffle into sleep? Life cares only for itself, resolute and whole. Get out of your own way. Fear and its resultant resignation is the greatest killer.
Fear compounds that which is feared, and therein is a form of collusion.
Empty supermarket shelves, blocked sewers? Welcome to the material world. Get a life.
The Age of Enlightenment? Living in the material world? The resultant aberration of callous indifference towards Mother Earth becomes synonymous with callous indifference towards our very being and, thereby, it is we who pay the cost. That’ll be 10/6d.
Look at it this way, Mother Earth needs to take a break from capitalist greed, desertification and devastation, and if that break is not given, then most surely she will take it. See how the storms blow? As if that should not be warning enough.
The landscape of fear is bleaker than the bleakest desert where the sky is too bright to countenance. To counter that with negative darknesses is to stand against life and the eternity of inner light. In whatever form, we will prevail.
Begin right now and continue beginning. No past, no future. There’s no end to it.
Disengage from the psychic poison of the media, smash the smart phone, flush impotency. Free your mind, free the world.
Abandon the delusions of duality. There is no balance to be made twixt this or that. There is no either, only neither, which is to say that this is all or this is nothing at all. There is no in-between. Therein the great healing. Bless.
Given that thought is orchestration, we’re playing a pretty poor tune. Listen, winds blow in the cleansing, so can we not sing also of light? It is ours to bear tragedy, but ours also to smile in the face of adversity; what we share is beauty incarnate.
When everything returns to ‘normal’? The machinery of war, the belching smokestacks of industry, the screaming chainsaws of deforestation, the indignity of slave labor, the prejudices and the poverty. Normal? Change is no longer an option, it’s an imperative. Start now.
Einstein didn’t have a Smartphone and cats can’t count, so what’s so relative about that? Have a nice day.
And now the sun that we be reminded, or the sweet tone of blackbird or lone seagull high above, rested in a silence which so often is beyond us. In this peace, so we too belong everlasting. Cast away the shackles of fear that love and light might prevail against all adversity.
Take a physical and psychic break from electromagnetic harm. Bin the Smartphone, throttle Alexa, erase Facebook. Be practical, take a good look at G5 and work towards its extinction. There’s a whole world out here breathing light, and that for sure will be the healing of it.
The mind is an empty void awaiting instructions. Beware of intruders. In self isolation, take time to isolate the true self, for that is the source of true healing, true love and true light wherein we’re eternally bound together as one. We know this intrinsically; so, act upon it.
The UK is currently being run by the underpaid; it is they who risk their health stacking shelves, delivering goods, nursing the sick. These laudable foot soldiers give their all, but where the bonuses? Meanwhile the Generals hide away in bullion bulging bunkers of wealth.
Step back; solid ground is that which exists prior to ideas of self. And here the light is eternal and peace is entire. The blackbird sings confirmation, the breeze chuckles at the practical joke of it.
As people across the world are drawn to a greater solidarity, how are we to ensure that this is not in the future exploited by the capitalist overlords and their lackey politicians? United in our love and caring, the future can be ours. We shall not be torn apart.
A state of being or being in a state? Note the air, its purity. Note the silences, the calm. Note the breath, its unthought joy. Never in abeyance, life lives life and, regardless of our concerns, will continue to do so. We are a part of this, not apart from it. Claim it back.
Recently received – ‘The Global Parliament demands the immediate decommissioning of all biological warfare laboratories throughout the world including those which claim to serve only the interests of defense. Failure to comply to these demands could have grave consequences’.
This is one big wake-up call. Power will only be given to the people when the people take it unto themselves in no half measure.
This time around it’s firstly the earth that must be healed; our fate in this must surely be secondary. We have so injured this beautiful planet and now she rages in the pain of it and we dare ask for salvation? We could have learnt but didn’t. We can learn, but will we?
Sad times, beautiful times. Never before has not knowing been such a forceful form of knowing. We are together in this like maybe nothing ever before. The snow is snowing, the wind is blowing and therein lies promise.
And yes, we are but passing through that this precious moment we might sing to rise into mighty anthems of sorrow and joy. We have been together in this darkness and light. It will not be forgotten. That even now the blackbird sings and sweet Spring be held in thrall. Bless.
Dark skies. White horse, black horse. Two egrets head south that we might turn away from our self-interest to be the common ground that is the right to touch and be touched. To have is to hold.
Soft ring of bells. Touch of hoof on grassland. A sparrow mid-flight. These are the strands, the web woven in solitude, which is also touch of heart, first breath and the one yet indefinable certainty. There is great strength in vulnerability.
Between this and that and before and after, we namelessly exist in a nameless place way beyond our human frailties, wholesome and entire in an eternity of being which knows no other but freedom’s fire.
Where all assumptions are broken, we are cast into billowing clouds where even supposition holds no ground. And herein the ethereal juggles light and we become disconnected in joys of forgetfulness. Both a beginning and an end, and we the in-betweenness.
What we know runs deeper than anything that we might like to think we know. In short, shun psychological complexities, trust the inner being, listen to the heart; it is here that we belong eternal and beyond belonging.
Normal never was. History is the bad soap opera of lost moments. Conformity is a straitjacket. Ours is the redefinition; settle for no less.
At some point or other we’ll all end up with our backs up against the wall, but stop, turn around and know that it’s a gate, a matter of attitude beyond which the fearsome beauty of wildness exists untrammeled. Herein the meaning of love. Reach out.
The resonances run deep; apart but together. Do we really need material proof of being? We drift with the clouds, rise with the tides; all the unspoken moments of all time which is no time at all. In love we are complete.
The powers that be aren’t. Wake up to it.
Is this sorrow’s landscape or the untouchable beauty of being? We are conjoined in this; each plays its part. The swooping crow abbreviates azure skies. And we?
Sad times indeed, but we have ourselves and each other, and surely that is enough? To express negativity is to spread it. Trust who you are, be who you are. Love what you are. Forward.
Truth is before any idea of itself, and both before and after any idea of self. Truth is an absolute, there are no absolutes.
The silence is ours, the eternal spring of life, and where we create form, so too we must face the consequences both individually and as a whole. Each and every; there is no other way.
The mountains, the valleys, the rivers, the seas; the inseparable nature of being, temporal yet whole. And then our tears. Are we really so apart?
Else? What else? Is this not the only moment in which we can act, the only moment where body is life and life is body; a mutual accord? Yes, only this moment and the love that we bring to it in constant renewal.
And then the waiting which leeches time, devours the moment and torments the heart. But waiting for what? In whatever form, this is it, and whatever there is to be done can only be done within it, right now. Come what may, it’s we who make the world around us.
Only ever in one place, we move in multiple dimensions ducking in and out of what we like to imagine is the terra firma of the material world. One step before the other we move and find that we have stopped, stop and find that we have moved. Essence?
Alone in our togetherness, Rome was built in a day. The puzzle is laid. Therein the connection, herein the beginning. Peace.
Time drifts, space shrinks and the two major building blocks of materialist thought cease to hold sway. This is the infinite potential within the formless freedom of existence. The becoming is over; this is the belonging.
Destiny is what is, not what might be.
Reason is the new irony, and we mere puppets to its conceits. Frankenstein, nothing.
The present becomes prescience, silent in its abandonment. In not seeing this, we blind ourselves to the infinite potential of being. Turn, then, to the deep resonance of pre-existence, the harmonic, the parallel. See how we fly?
Time and space are crudely constructed boundaries limiting us from the indivisible, divine nature of being. Abandon measurement, defy definition. The blackbird sings; we are the all, nothing will stop us.
The New World Order is an old story of loss and lingering, but then the light, the sense of woodland and the sweet odour of leaf mould. Look now, the gates are opening.
We do not have the choice, choice has us. Then what is this self which stands between us and our own true nature? Buddha farts and the mountains tumble.
Each moment a transference, each breath a gift gilded blue as bluest skies that forever we return.
The planet settles down; fresh air, a healing breeze, a profound silence. Only the bird song. Planes grounded, cars dwindled, a passing stranger holds their distance and smiles. Are these to be short-lived blessings?
Mother Earth reclaims her mystery. Infinite skies unscarred by planes, air unpolluted, hoverflies responding to a whistle, sparrows returned to the cherryplum trees; a silence more profound than the conceits of any scriptures, the freedom of being left alone to love entire.
Time shrinks along with space, both being dimensional constructs for which we should have little time or space. The skies unscarred by planes offer a glimpse into infinity and its suggestion of immortality. Nice.
Vulnerability is the essence of poignancy. Poignancy is the essence of love. Let the doors of heart open silent in its wisdom.
The wisdom of silence is within the silence of wisdom.
Time will take no persuasion; if we are of it, then so be it, we too will not be persuaded. However, beyond these strictures the oceanic potential of infinite possibilities awaits us. Step out, this is our birth right.
And so the constancy of beginning; a redefinition to determine the nature of ending and its constancy. Busy going nowhere…
Where fear rules the roost, the piper plays the tune.
The hidden agenda of capitalist intent – fear nor care. Can’t buy me love…
And yes, we can know the deeper truth quite simply because we are it.
So, when this is over (according to the authorities who have largely authored the nature of the event), then shall we meet again corporeal yet still essence (which surely we now know is enough). Tides turn, mountains crumble.
Cynically orchestrated by Government and its lackey media, fear is the true killer within the pestilence that surrounds us. For how much longer are we prepared to suffer the cant of misrule? The heart cannot be governed nor love betrayed.
Pandemic or crude exercise in social engineering? Don’t look now.
And if death is a part of the story, then, for certain, we are that death every bit as much as this life, blessed in our intimacy with matter, divine in our incomings and outgoings. Oh, this wild peace, this exquisite moment; the intangible, temporal scream of life.
There’s no two ways about it, peace is not a state of mind, but a state of being. It either is or it is not. Never mind!
The circus comes to town. The crowds gather. The lions are let loose.
Driven by capitalist intrigue and the endless wars (social & biological) fought in its name, greed is the greatest of pestilences. Our refusal to engage with the unthinkable is our complicity within this. The victims of Hiroshima became shadows on a psychic wall. Look now, look.
Okay, so they can defend their time-worn privileges ‘whatever the cost may be’; they can fight us on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets, but this time around they might not find it so easy. Freedom is our birthright; hold to it.
The mind is the great tyranny which claims self and then holds it down in abeyance. Beyond all that, we are the knowing of life itself; life life-ing life. Nothing else can determine our being, for we are that being. To be, but also not to be; therein the flight of angels.
A plague of ignorance currently engulfs us all. Dada or Alice’s Wonderland? Answers, please, on a single sheet of toilet paper.
This alone we know. This alone we feel. This alone together. This one that is many. This I, this you, this moment where love is the only completion. The words that dance as the signifier, the signified and the significance. All one within the circle. Anytime a form of holding.
An open door needs no key.
Mustard gas? Nothing. Defense? Forget it. Guided by corporate/militarist interest, biological laboratories around the globe daily study the nature of annihilation and how it might be put to use covertly or otherwise. Unthinkable? Think again. Truth is, we know, but choose not to.
And then the winds, the tides, the silence, the joy, not as separate entities, but as a whole – the great nothing of all things.
Choosing not to know is choosing not to act; the word is complicity.
Power or not, now is all we’ve got. Ain’t no one can take that away from us.
What happens is now, and then now, which is not then again, but now again: that way freedom. Escape the tyranny of reason.
Arrival ensures departure. Constancy compounds the ethereal. Integrity is in defiance of itself. To stand apart is to stand against. Meaning has none; shadow no more, we are at last free to love.
Lockdown or no lockdown, the torpid chaos of enforced ignorance will prevail regardless. Normal never was, so what possible chance is there of returning to it? Who’s fooling who? The true devastation is incalculable. Caprice is to be the new future. Have a nice day.
It’s the shadows that devour us; our own.
If all is everything, so it must contain nothing. Equally, if nothing is nothing, so it must contain everything, and there the basic flaw of the dualistic mind. Light is shadow as shadow is light. The magpie cares little for our concerns.
To do or not to be, that is the materialist trap.
Existence IS essence. All the rest is egotistic bullshit.
Time has evaporated. Space has dissolved. The moment has expanded to become an infinity of absurdities. The circus comes to town. If it is possible, it is generally probable. The clown farts in the face of propiety.
Never forget that we are only moments away, resolute and entire. Does the wind bend to itself? Then what is this folly?
This is not an either/or, but a one which is the other which is one. Consciousness of plague or plague of consciousness? There’s no reason to be reasonable. Let the heart lead.
Fear wears the shoes of the dead.
We are the timeless strand which has no beginning, and which knows better than to become. Forever light, cathartic yet vulnerable and all-consuming, our innocence cannot be stolen from us. This is the age of abandonment. We are no more.
Of a love untold, the unspoken togetherness of commonality; that you are I as I am you. Even in death we cannot be parted, for this is the very everness of being. Truly, we can know no more. Love is enough.
Beneath these dreams and imaginings there is life undefined, and therein abides an innocence unlost. And this is the treasure which is each and every one of us. The future is forever now.
The wind also can howl.
Come to think about it, all thought is attachment. I think therefore I pay the cost. Ah, the materialist man (sic).
When philosophy becomes the sole answer, you can be pretty certain that you’re in deep shit.
Way beneath the materialist trinkets and gewgaws of human conceit, through our tears and in our sorrows, in our beauties and our joys, the forces of nature repeatedly expose the precious vulnerability of our everlasting, unsullied innocence. The gate is ever open.
True detachment is no detachment at all. Call it freedom. Bye now.
Love operating from within any given moral attitude or psychological conditioning is not love, but propaganda. Doing good is one thing, but being good is altogether another.
Soap bubbles in the breeze, eggshells of the mind. Nothing holds, never ever could. The beans are growing, the sparrows and starlings have returned; all despite the great unknowing. How small our frail ideas of self that we refuse the embrace of this precious temporality.
By looking to radical creativity, we get closer to being able to think the unthinkable and to move away from the restrictions placed on us by those who’s power is defined not by wisdom, but by the barrel of a metaphorical gun.
You are that I am, drifted in the silence. There is nothing that stands between us but our ideas of self. So, know this. The symbiosis is greater than the sum of its parts. The union is ever entire. Love needs no expression for it is of itself and cannot be divided. Love is all.
Nailed to the cross of materialism, these are the lost, the confounded, the deluded, calling from the mount that the skies be tamed, and the tides shackled. Invisible in our abandonment, we are untouchable. The blackbird tells a pretty story.
Yes, all things must pass, it’s just that some of those things seem to pass rather slowly. And whilst we’re about it, if the meek shall inherit the earth, just who exactly are they going to inherit if from? The writing’s on the wall, shame about the punctuation.
Penny Rimbaud. Spring 2020
Time and A Place
Time has evaporated. Space has dissolved. The moment has expanded to become an infinity of absurdities. Viral malignancy? The circus comes to town. Malice in blunderland, karma drama. nature defiling the defiler or a nasty piece of opportunist social engineering? Income or outcome, this is the torpid chaos of enforced ignorance; lockdown, shut down and shut up. Don’t look now, but any sense of personal and social security, economic or otherwise, has become glaringly exposed for the illusion that it really is. Likewise, dreams of material permanence and stability have been carried away by winds of fate to fall on barren deserts of our own making.
And from those shadows such pampered joys fled
That here we reach out to touch, yet are confounded.
But in our eyes all time and no time.
How then can we but love?
I reach out to you, but you are rockworn in our passing.
You gasp at my coldness,
But it is the black crow that I see rising to those great heights,
Held upon your breath, broken from the sheath.
And then comes mist and the mountaintops are no more,
And above that, a cry from the wilderness
Which is wind and scrambled scree, untouchable, yet whole.
And in that calling, a name that cannot be called nor even spoken.
Is this, then, the shaking, the obscenity of refusal?
So then, if normal it ever was before the beast was born, what possible chance is there of returning to that state? In any case, given the horrors that abide so comfortably within that old normality, why would we even hope to revisit it? The degree of current societal devastation being caused by fumbling mismanagement, intentional or not, has yet to be assessed, indeed, will it ever be possible to do so? Moreover, and perhaps more positively, the deeper cultural effects will manifest for decades to come and, in this respect, the past has become nullified and the future is ours alone to create as we will. Yes, the slate has been wiped clean and, unwittingly, we have been cast into a psychic void where reason will bear no thought. Caprice will be the new future. Mystics will become the new pragmatists.
Capitalism needs its passive consumers, but we have been cast out,
isolated. By now we should perhaps know better.
And if we fathom this, then we too rise to those heights
Which also are depths, for that is our common soul,
That is our waking even before the sorrow,
Sleep describing a lost tomorrow.
And when I see the hunter hunt, I am the hunter,
Yet when the hunter’s spear be blunted,
I too am blunt, dumb blunt mouthed blunted.
Then is this global malaise a Frankenstein’s monster, a covert deliberation gone horribly wrong? In the clinical bio-labs of cynical death, the dice are rolled and we become a mere statistic; numbers not names. Call it attack, call it defence, whatever the intention and whatever the result, this is the vile intimacy of warfare; fear, the greatest weapon of mass destruction.
Fear wears the shoes of the dead.
Conjecture, paranoia or existential reality? Rats bear the plague, but it is another more sinister species which spreads these new sorrows; targeted, randomly scattered or simply a case of outright negligence? Someone, somewhere, knows the truth, while in deep truth we all of us know; if it is possible, then it is all too probable. Our complicity in this is in our refusal to think the unthinkable.
The lime pits harvest our complacency.
So then, I turn from this perch upon the crag
And see the abyss, see matter undone that I too am undone.
And reason veils the absurd and masks the belly
Which I have stroked and sea-bathed,
Which thrills to the sombre, dark pools of madness,
For that is my blood, the very stream born of life
That life in turn be born.
I will take nothing else in my forgetfulness.
We have been. Is that not enough?
There is an eerie essence to the current situation, something which defies explanation. The singular has lost all meaning. We are all in this together, yet never so alone. As much threat as threatened; a love beyond itself.
And if death is a part of this story, then, for certain, we are that death every bit as much as we are this life, blessed in our engagement with matter.
Nature cannot destroy itself, but man (sic) can. He has made an art of it. Then am I that he, that great darkness? A shadow of death upon the crumbling walls of Hiroshima? A stepladder leading to the outstretched arms of Mammon?
‘My God, what have we done?’
Then here I raze the terrace where once I gathered grape,
Juggling huge boulders which otherwise are weight.
No Sisyphus, I.
The grove drips green
And the mossy mound is soft and calling,
But perhaps I hear not the whisper.
Is that my falling?
Oh, shame that the lilies bloom and the poppies bleed. We are all one in this bedlam, yet the trenches are empty. The surgeon awaits in vain. The gas was green. We saw it coming, but that was before, before this new form of revolt. But let me ask this; were we not also led to the camps, bled in the battlefields, etherised in that dreadful flash that wretched Christs might call the tune against our innocence? The calvaries are buckled in the storm.
Oh, surely now, there is no punishment in this,
Nor reprimand, nor even subtle warning?
Is this, then, the sacrifice of innocence
Which is the daily sacrifice of innocence,
Which is the blind and the gag,
The selfish, self-consuming face of conformity
Disguised as origin feigning purity?
I tire of this. My heart becomes weary. This Eden, this garden of delights. This right of ours; the inalienable right to be. But so too am I drawn to embrace this death in life, to take it on as a blessing upon material form to better assert the corporeal.
Divine in our immateriality, oh, this wild peace, this exquisite moment; the intangible, temporal scream of life. The air is so pure, lost constellations reappear; introspection honours the unknown. I see the smile. I smile back. It is the echo of a self I shall never know.
But come now, are not those puritan brothers shipped away,
Erased and cursed, cursed and erased?
Is the ocean so reckless
That it contains, consumes, subsumes?
Then, yes, the puritan brothers have gone,
Devoured that light might prevail against this dark,
That there be shadows no more.
And if love be love, then it shall remain intact, for that is the very core, the untrammelled nature that exists entire to itself beyond our conceits of time and space. To do or not to be, that is the materialist flaw which haunts our temporality against righteous wisdom of immortality. We are the timeless strand which has no beginning, and which knows better than to become. Forever light, cathartic yet vulnerable and all-consuming, our innocence cannot be stolen from us. The Enlightenment is over. This is the Age of Abandonment. We are no more. Yet be warned, the abyss of bad intent might still seek to argue the point.
And when I see the hunter hunt,
I see the hunter’s face.
But if I too am the hunter
Who weaves time and cannot wait,
I, then, am both hunter and hunted
Beyond the garden gate.
There is great meaning in meaninglessness,
and great depth in the emptiness that is I.
The knife be sharp, the knife be blunted.
Swoosh.
The black crow falls from grace
And the mountains tumble to more lowly a place.
Then here again you stand before me
Challenging conceits, demanding a purity
Where we know not of body, still less of mind.
Born of light, so in light,
Born of life, so in life,
You alone, I alone, we alone,
Beyond the shadows,
Eternity’s children held together at last
In the arms of a love supreme.
IT IS THE UNFATHOMABLE SHADOWS THAT DEVOUR US; OUR OWN.
Penny Rimbaud. May 2020.
These two poems were donated by Penny Rimbaud to fundraise for the Vortex. If you enjoyed Little Notes on Crisis Karma and A Time and A Place you might like to give a small donation here