Empty Envelope

Empty. Blessing or curse? Tabula rosa, I'm not thinking - am I? Candle flickers, rain bullets rebound from glass inevitability, cider sits half-empty, all empty, a night as silent as the moon hiding behind these clouds. In the rainy night: no clouds, no stars, no moon, no sky, just a blank slate heavens, unthinking, leaking, a perfect mirror for my mind.
I stood in an alley of trees, the smell of fall finally arrived. Fall sits, patiently awaiting the heavy rains, where the redolence is freed. Emptied, a heavy breeze carried the rain and a torrent of leaves, and I simply stood, catching the leaves as they traveled by, pelted with colors. Even a barrenness, an emptiness is beautiful sometimes: a ghastly beauty, a transparent, phantom elegance like dust and cobwebs in abandoned homes, like ancient, cracked mirrors, a winter wheat field,  shrouded in heavy mist, hands having given a gift, winter trees with fallen leaves, violins, wordless and minor in an eerie whisper, wisps of fragment dreams come morning, silence before a storm, the wordlessness of knowing, staring at the ceiling on long, quiet nights, mountain devotionals.
An emptiness of something makes room for a fullness of another.



may I be, awakened from my slumber
you slice, with gentle knife,
my blankets and my cover
whisking me from beneath
my veil of mystery
unwrap me in your soft
fingertips, smooth 
my wrinkled edges and smell
a delivered world
pen-kisses, thumbprints, a lick
of love, each dot, jot, tittle,
our hands held distantly
caress me, hold me in your eyes
closer, fondly, my heart as paper
in your tender hands


my heart is rent and sent as missive
mailed down rainy river
in return I found a pen
which doth my blood embitter
my ink-blood blue
pen-heart stained, too
please current soon deliver

Well, that was uglier than the first...
Listening to the rain: is there anything more peaceful?


Knowledge forbidden?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know?
Can it be death?
~ Milton - Paradise Lost

What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
~ Milton - Paradise Lost

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty

What is beautiful? You are. The most beautiful.

I read, once, about how in China for a long time (almost a thousand years), culture valued the smallness of feet as standard for beauty.  At a young age, the girl's feet were bound, and toes were frequently broken in an attempt at inhibiting growth. The whole process is quite gruesome, and wikipedia discusses it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding) in miserable detail. All delicate attraction was tiny feet.
I have naturally small feet - not a benchmark of beauty in America - and I don't believe my beauty, or the beauty of anyone, is wholly reliant upon the the size of feet, the symmetry of face, stars in the eyes, in cheekbones high and prominent, chest, legs, or hairy heads. Of course I believe in a beauty of the heart, the spirit, the mind - or want to believe. Well, at the end of the day, at least you are beautiful.
I'm a perfectionist. I'm not perfect. What is beautiful? Sometimes I catch myself thinking beauty is everything in a bubble around me, exclusive.

no sound falls from the morning sky
no sound wrinkles the evening pool
~ Maya Angelou

There is so much that needs doing. Loving, living so tightly bound, around our hearts, ours and mine. A diffidence of difference, where's the line? The eager ember golden coin of sunlight burrows through these blinds, today's surprise, I suppose. Where are the grey skies? The writing weather, wherefore art thou, Raineo?
I'm trekking into the center of Oregon, tomorrow and this weekend. I've made posts nearly every day for a long while. It's strange to be missing some. Maybe I'll sneak some in.

rose petals falling
beneath an autumn red moon
will not adorn your unmarked graves
~ Maya Angelou

I'm full to bursting with life and everything. Struggling to learn things that I'm naturally lousy at, and suffuse them through my livelihood, and then pulling off the balance act of community that ever threatens to tip one way or the other. There's a gray pallor over the heart, a fractal of cumulus clouds with rains and sun-breaks. The ventricles central still hammer the same, the anvil forge beating a rhythm of being, crimson beneath skies of slate, and blue oceans of spent life-rivers, trudging the waterways. Full to bursting, my lungs say, but it's a contented burgeoning, a joy contained that ticks time behind a cage. Beat along, beat alone, beat a tone of silent survival beneath the dingy day. For twilight, well, may steal your breath away.