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A VISIT
I’ve always imagined that one of these nightsI’d see my mother’s ghost. I would welcome the sightwelcome she that bore me, not she that stepped inin a way,absolving my birth mother of her sin,while assuming adopting me would make her complete. She hasn’t visited yet, neither has done so,but I hold out hope, it is…
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CENTER SEAT
My friends have often wondered aloudwhy I claim to be most creative whenI am stuck on an airplane for hours. I have told them that the solitude,the lack of It is an interesting quirkof the internet, that birthand death are disconnected. Seeking out those born todayI found a long list, the dinosauramong which is Judy…
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PARENTHOOD
Two headstonesName, rank, branchof service, dates. One New Jersey, oneVirginia, both Bittleneither certain. An email fromanother Bittle, neverknew my father but his wasWilliam, and inthat moment, James Owen becamea father yet againand I complete. And later stilla single picturehe in the back row and the mirroragrees that weare truly family.
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DUGO AND UNGAN MEET
When your mind is ragingthoughts flowing, eddyingwhen you enter the zendowhat do you do in sitting? Do you take your stickand measure the waterto insure a safe fording,or do you sit amid the streamand let the floodwash over and around youdry and silent within? A reflection on Case 36 of the Iron Flute Koans
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MINNESOTA
The night fully settles over northern Minnesota in the sky grows dark as the stars make their reluctant appearance. Peering through the tall grasses of the wetlands abutting the road 1000 stars are born and die in an instant only to be reborn again repeatedly, until they are replaced by the beetles that accompany the…
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ROSHI
To arise from the earth is simple, too fall back the more difficult, for that is a journey we all seem to fear, though with no arising, there can be no falling back. When I finally admitted that I feared dying and didn’t want to be drafted to fight in that war Roshi asked me…
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IN THE BEGINNING
You so very want there to be no ending but there must be, just as there had to be a beginning and you had no say about that. Endings are hard, they remind you of small deaths, all but one, but each is also a birth of sorts, and like you know, they arise and…
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THEN NOW
The gap between hail and farewell is small an unbridgeable, no one can walk across, and yet the mind spans but falls away, to hail and ultimately to farewell and between they stare into a chasm they call life
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PHOTO
Oddly I have a photo of my grandmother’s grave, but not one of my mothers, either of them actually, and we’ve yet to have a funeral for the one who raised me. I forgive the one who gave me life, for she gave me to one she felt could care for me well and she…
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CHILD OF GHOSTS
I am a child of ghosts, my parents adopted and birth, all visit me, but only in my dreams, for ghosts prefer the reality that dreams allow. Some say that dreams are not real, but they live in the mind as do every other reality I experience each day, my senses merely inexact lenses for…
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an old writer and his words 