Prayer Candle

Prayer Candle

I strike a half-chewed match,

to light my meditation candle. I watch

the yellow fish with the vermillion slipstream

dig,

with acid blue lips

into voiceless wax cylinders.

They were green or violet, to begin with, then white

and now red. They make scents for a while,

bleeding into skewbald reefs between sand-grains

every day,

and sweating into smoke. I watch this naked

ichthyologic archetype of everything that is

flames insist with undulant fluke strokes

to dive

past the waxy crater’s pastel depression

into viscous and deepening seas.

I burrow this abyssal column, probing

in my little faux comet’s wake:

When will I?

Where will I?

With whom will I?

What will we?

How will we?

God, will we?

With each whispered word

the fish flicks its fluke, too cutely, shimmying

shimmering muscles of molten brass.

I relent, then

sigh and blow the light away most nights,

wondering if what I search for is not

dark matter, a denizen of unfathomed space:

a dusky octopus inking, ghostly. Smoke wisps

rise into the wind and escape. I want to

see a flame turn on its wick

and unmoor

and leap

and unfurl its latent incendiary plumage.

I want to see the fire that flies

out of curtained, upstairs rooms

and alights upon entire communities,

gingerly setting its talons on olive trees

like a phoenix that wants to be a dove.

Mother Knows Best

Dear Ma,

You know that the feminists love it when I call you ‘Ma’. I am speaking to the God who appeared to me in the vision just before my grandmother died, the woman who plucked me onto her magic carpet from the blackness of space when I floated too far. That was one year ago today. I can hardly absorb that You may have known my path then. The way I saw You holding my sister reminded me of what Jesus said just as he entered Jerusalem: “Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How I long to gather you under me like a mother hen gathers her chicks...” I’m almost there.

But I still don’t "get" You all the time. As I was settling down to write about the challenge of thinking in shekels instead of dollars, I scanned my iTunes list for some groove-support. I had the urge to listen to a song I would not normally, “One More Day” by Diamond Rio. It has the familiar warmth of sing-able love songs and okay instrumentation: guitar, piano, mandolin, soft percussion.

The day the person who gave me that track left, I was so far into her black & white world that I couldn’t help but be Rick Blaine in her “Casa Blanca” moment, telling her to go as she disappeared. There could not be even one more day. I loved that film. I also loved “The Wedding Singer”, where Robby Hart jumps on the plane and steals Julia from her douche-bag fiancé. When I have the choice, I want to be Robby Hart. This time, the woman drove into the sunset and disappeared (many know this story~ it's a really great ending!)

What felt like an amputation was actually a final cadence—resolved, poetically. I’m happier in this life. Why would you draw my attention there, when I am past regret? Yet, there is something resonant in the chorus: “One more day. One more time. One more sunset, maybe I’d be satisfied... but then again, I know what it would do: leave me wishing, still, for one more day with you.”

...but I had no time to contemplate sunsets. It was night in Bethlehem, just then, when Mr. Zoughbi called and invited me to join him at a wedding reception. Just as a reminder, You had sent me to Palestine. Ten minutes later, I was walking into a ballroom at the community center. A multitude of Arab people were clapping their hands, dancing and raising the roof in celebration. The guys basket-tossed the groom and then the couple more or less crowd surfed. In the background, a Palestinian DJ rotated through an endless collection of songs with heavy back-beats beneath traditional Arab vocals, pipes and strings. It was overwhelming...

“This is Arab music!” said Zoughbi with pride, “You can dance, if you want!”

I watched for what felt like a long time, trying to decipher the cultural secret to not embarrassing myself. I love dancing the same way I love soccer—I do what comes naturally and have little technical training. Here, I would also be the strange white person who showed-up in jeans. Then that voice started talking to me—the one that says things like:

“If you don’t improvise something, then you have nothing to play at all...”

“Look at the male Israeli guard—he doesn’t want to be here any more than you do...”

“At worst, everybody will think you love gay-people and, c’mon, you do love gay people...”

“Shake the meth-head’s hand and introduce yourself~ that will disarm him.”

This time it said “You’re a token white-guy sitting at the table, too; your soul will be better for dancing.” I continued to watch for a few minutes longer, remembering how disappointed I had been at cousin Beth’s wedding because there had been no dancing at the reception. Even more, I hated to miss Pat’s wedding~ my ‘twin’ cousin, born the day before me.

“I love weddings,” I said to Zoughbi, “I had to miss my cousin’s wedding...”

I finished my beer and headed to the dance floor. I forgot all my ‘moves’ from high school... thank goodness! I watched the people around me, in ties and dresses like any other wedding, moving to this strange, catchy music. I felt a tingle come over me—I liked the music. Even better, they seemed to dance on the same principles I did—just move with the beats and don't worry! One young fella looked like he was trying to make headway with a girl. Little children were bouncing on their parents’ shoulders. People were joining hands and going in circles, or clapping and stamping their feet. Ma, that’s when I think You whispered to me, “Taste and see all the parts of you I made for other places and people...”

You had taken me back to that state of mind, when I just wanted a little certainty—just one more day like ‘those days’. It was like running into a wraith of myself, some version that was never meant to be—living alone in Grand Rapids, slowly metabolizing inertia. As I joined the celebration of lives coming together, I came into myself again in the uncanniness: strobe lights, photographers, kids running around tables and... Arab techno, people smoking apples through water-pipes and a cake-cutting ceremony that involved a sword (sword!). I was full of good food and I could hardly stop laughing and smiling at all the people ‘getting down’ to the music. I don’t know how the Muslim residents do weddings but the Christians know how to party.

“You will see many more weddings like this, in my family,” said Zoughbi, when I returned again. It was so wonderful, Ma, to be in the midst of people who relish life lived with the throttle up.

When I thought I was ready to just watch again, a lyric grabbed my attention—in English:

“I had... the time of my li-ife... and I owe it all to you-uuuuu.”

It was a cheesy techno version of the song but I danced as I have not in years; I really was having the time of my life and I owe it all to You. Like I told Plainfield and Constantine United Methodist Churches, “There is something greater than believing in yourself—which is believing in God’s vision for you!”

The temptation is to say that I have left Diamond Rio and the warmth of love songs behind. Ma, I give you more credit than that. Nothing will be wasted. You would not let me settle and miss the possibilities that were here for me. I wanted so badly to create what my parents never had that I was in a hurry to put together that life of contentment before You had given me all of these new gifts. As I said when I retitled this blog, You are a God who sees in Rainbow colors, who wouldn’t leave me saying “play it again Sam” but saying “I just want to grow old with you.”

The biggest difference of all, though, is that You have become the number one woman in my life. And I have to say, You are one hell of a woman to make so many women that I admire—like my Grandmother who passed away or
...someone else, out there.

Strange Orbit

"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How I long to gather you under me like a mother hen gathers her chicks..."

When my eyes opened, I was swimming in perfect silence. There was no sound of bubbles rushing over my ears or the distant rumble of outboard motors. No muted calls from birds above the surface or the low grating of water rushing over boulders. There was no sound of my lungs wheezing, even though I was not holding my breath at all. In fact, I could not feel anything either. No sand brushing against my chest, no horse-flies landing on my back, no cool water tightening my scrotum. Nothing I associated with swimming was there at all. No pier covered with sea-gull feces, no smell of stale algae on the sea-wall, no Grams waiting up the hill with goldfish crackers—no Buck with a long, cane fishing-pole.

I swam through a translucent, barely heterogeneous field of red. In every direction I turned there was the same rusted crimson. I knew where I was, though I do not know quite how. Looking into the distance, I could just barely see her silhouette. She did not paddle. She soared ahead of me-- and when I stopped flailing like I was under-water, I soared too—

I pulled-up, knowing that the haze below me must be at least a mile thick and the same throughout. With a click of my heels, I triggered the tiny jets in my space-boots and ascended. I was much deeper into this cloud than I had imagined: the layers began to get thinner and thinner but I wondered if there ever would be a true surface. As my suit lifted out of the fog, I saw the outline before me doing the same, leaving a trail in her wake like a sky-liner. Behind her, the gargantuan yellow orb of Saturn came into focus. I noted how much brighter it seemed from this distance: almost unstreaked by cloud bands, buttery hued, glowing in the light of an unseen sun. Come to think of it, I think that Saturn was the Sun—if the Sun had a smoky, glass-globe like the lamp in my bedroom. Suddenly, I breached the surface of the cloud ring like a humpback whale. In the next moment, panic ensued—now, I was on the edge, trying to rest on the surface without sinking back into obscurity. Instead, the momentum from my boots set me adrift: losing the surface and drifting into void. Then, I turned around...

It was a bed; a cross between the biggest king-size you can imagine, a set of 1960's retro rockets and a magic carpet. I say so because it had a head-board and footboard, about eight blue flames emanating from its stern and an abundance of Middle-eastern designs. On this most mystical craft, my beloved sister Molly was lying in the arms of a woman. The woman appeared to be comforting my sister. She impressed me as the most maternal woman I had ever seen—she was breathtaking yet warm. I knew that she was one and the same with the figure I was chasing in the red-cloud. Momma? Not my mother... too tall... no freckles or glasses... long, straight hair... brown eyes, of course, just like my mother (brown eyes are maternal in my sub-conscious).

I climbed onto the bed, suddenly unburdened of my space-suit and in my pajamas. I crawled toward my sister and rested with her—cuddling her like I never could in real-life. I thought "Now I don't have to be alone any more... we don't have to be alone..."

—all of this was after receiving the phone call from my sister at 6:30 AM. She called for lack of anything better to do, since there was a drunk man outside her door. He was convinced that he was at his own room. He was not. Once the RAs came to cart him away, my sister discovered he had drooled in several places on the floor...

I told her not to let him in (duh), then returned to my slumber-- and my dreaming. All of this was Sunday morning—-after Friday and before our lives were about to change yet again. It was not until that evening that I figured-out who the woman in my dream had to be.

Not Mom... not some future wife-figure. That was God. God is our Mother~ every good characteristic of motherhood ought to be something that God has. That's a backward way of justifying the comparison—as if mothers had those characteristics and God purloined them later (not the case?). ...of course, the God portrayed in the Old Testament does not always seem so maternal. I think (these are my personal feelings, not a Biblical argument) that they got Her all wrong... that She/He has to be more like the image Jesus conjured just before he entered Jerusalem to be arrested: "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How I long to gather you under me like a mother hen gathers her chicks...". I needed to be plucked from outer space, like a lost sheep/coin/son... but didn't know why yet... (nor that it would be subject of the sermon later that morning...)