1.

No one ever questioned the infallible authority of the lights. I don’t know what to say in order to get it. I don’t know what to do in order to keep it. Love. Often it is the right time, but not the right place. Almost always it is the right place, but not the right time. Life wasn’t perfect, so why should books be? Who ever said a book had to violate one of the most inviolate laws of time and place. Namely, that rarely did one find those naughty two, time and place, life and literature, in the same space.

Just showing up. Let me say that again. Just showing up. Whole cities are built this way. ‘Cause we are always kinda building and hanging out at the same time, so you would just naturally think that we would always be having a good time, since we always get to stay the same, and we always get to change, because as insufferable as that may sound to some, Ovid was quick to point out many hundreds of times ago, that good ‘ol nature with his or her ancient everfresh smell, does much the same thing.

Some writers believe that the imagination is best served by creating a world as not-I as possible. I believe such writers are duping themselves with the most highly qualified intentions because if dream and reality are two very separate things then we have found something that never changes that is thicker than water. I, on the other hand, believe that the moment cannot be avoided, that showing up is an option of leisure for anyone that believes in love, that the right time and right place is for everything and everyone. For me, that time and place is now. That is my only dogma thank God for dogma, for it reminds us that there is something in us that does not change, that if we show up, we can change the world. But the imagination, like nature, will not go away because, unlike us, it has nowhere to go but us. Some might call this irony. Others might call this fate. I call it the difference between creating a special place to relax and learn (and subsequently taking credit for it) and taking responsibility for learning and relaxing rite here rite now, on the edge of history. For there is a life, a spirit here, too. And what our nature is, is just as important as where our nature is, not to mention what exactly makes it ours. And so sacred is this quest, that it will never be shuffled off to pure fiction. So why pretend. This is me. Let’s make belief…

Stop. Go. Slow down.

2.

Here we wonder what tree is saying to bird, steeple to sky, train to bridge. Here cities full of trees and skies teach us how to speak.

"Tell me again the story of night and day, " asks Anna of her grandfather.

Grandfather wraps one bear like paw around her delicate wrist and moves it around the paper. Anna is no longer holding the paintbrush but it seems as though the ideogram is only now coming to life once again. She watches entranced as her finger forms one straight line moving up and over the page. It stops, then, and traces a circle with a line through the middle of it.

"I am the east. And, Anna, you are my sun."

Anna smiles as she shades in one half of the first circle. She knows he'll watch and smile. And she knows he knows she knows he'll stand and watch and smile. All is part of an unspoken agreement between them as though time were the only one that could know time, that there was absolutely no reason not to be somewhere else, someone else anywhere anywhen.

They are together now. With each other. Of each other. Like night and day.

3.

Well. Is there anything really all that new in the world today? I dare us all to seek it out and celebrate it.

I'm tired of war. At least I get to choose the theatre and I choose my imagination. That is all I can do to honour those who have layed down there lives for me, middle eastern american what have you.

We think our "primitive" ancestors were small minded to get by without TV's and computers and CNN. Alls I'm saying is that they had their myths as well and on top of that , the waking knowledge of ...

The ultimate theatre of the mind

Nature and the people that colour it like light refracted onto a stone wall.

There was safety inside that cave and predators without.

This is that place.

Angels come in many forms.

And Angels are always feared before they are loved.

If I could be in every place at once, I would dance like light upon water and lift the spirit of the world onto its rightful throne.

Holy

Holy is this place

Water from whence we come and come to

I and my Name is One

Amen.

Peace is the only real war.

Peace is the only just war.

The rest is just confusion.

" o/~ If looks could kill they probably will…in games without frontiers….war without years…o/~" Peter Gabriel <shaking the tree>

4.

There are no more wars to fight save for that battle the earth wages against itself in the trees, in the sky, in the body and in the soul. If you must shed blood though, better it be that of the earth, for she knows better than to sacrifice her soul for the sake of foolish men.

My name is Peter Student, and it is a beautiful evensong where I love. In this place, the sun drenches everything with rain then pokes through the clouds like the fingers of a mother to an infant babe.

The leaves have fallen here. There are shades of red and yellow and brown and gold. Like a promise kept.

Where I love, clouds signal the end of the day by bathing the sun in her own reflection. Between the rustling of leaves by the wind that always signals winter, one can hear the old man sing, ….o/~ I talked like a man / but you didn't hear / my thanks in every raindrop tear…o/~…

With glorious ease they bound from revelation to revelation, stopping only to reflect upon their own brief history. What wondrous creatures these are, able to look within themselves and see a thought, transforming that thought it into whole cities and civilizations. Such activity. On a mere speck amidst the dark infinite that lay beyond.

Someone. Please. Someone. Scribble the first thought that comes to mind upon the window of your soul and we will chase it like a moonbeam across the heady expanse of night.

5.

I have discovered something today that may be of some interest to the people that come to old book stores on rainy Saturday afternoons and stop only just long enough to smell the tomb they may have written in some long forgotten life as a retired minister sitting on the Spring bank of the Mississippi while a school of children laugh and shout and play me into righteous oblivion.

That being that if singular purpose is anterior to myth then consciousness must be light, how architecture of any variety feels, what energy feels like. So as I look up at that miraculous metaphor in the sky the memory of you comes to me in waves. Your lips move. And I can hear what you say.

Take a prism, or any light like form of cassaeoptical persuasion, and rotate it in your palm as night moves into day. There now. You are walking on water.

Illusion?

Creation.

Creating illusion?

If you wish. When. You wish.

Necromantic songs of innocence and experience Breathe in the crystalline water running down the mountain from the cave of Maerlyn.

It is such a blessed thing to know, even for a short time, that like dreams of like, that the gods feel like you…blessed being.

The Goddess beckons me now. 'Til we meet again in cassaeoptical dreams may the road rise up to meet you and the wind be always at your back.

6.

Stop. Go. Slow down.

Suzy Bendel wasn't born in New York city. She came there from a place should could never leave.