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Stephen Pickering

Author: Stephen Pickering

  • A New Sonnet: Cape Arrow

    “Cape Arrow”

    One thing I do remember is the dance.
    Your river hair was flowing the magic nights.
    Steps guided by the heart’s inner lance.
    Our motion flew above the city lights.
    Remember fall among the yellow leaves?
    Our eyes reflected colors of the soul.
    Before we even knew we had the keys,
    Our fountain’s dream we danced around could flow.
    I wonder what you thought about our song?
    It echoes still, they say, that empty hall.
    It tries to resurrect what seems long gone
    A memory my heart will always call.
    I sometimes think when walking down this street,
    I’ll turn and somehow there again we’ll meet.

     

  • A New Sonnet: Cross of Lorraine

    Cross of Lorraine

    I wanted down the cotton pine below.
    It seemed the dream was calling from their root.
    I had escaped the cocktail party show:
    The empty voices blocking nature’s tune.

    The recent summons in the field of time:
    Our river’s bridge was rotting but still there.
    Perhaps it was just merely warmth from wine,
    I melted down that rickety old stair.

    I wondered would your eyes still have that glow
    If I could somehow reach across our lives;
    And swim the river down our muddy soul
    Where love forever dances in the night?

    Our little eyes that swim the river’s floor:
    Their secret depths open new love’s door.

    © 2013 Stephen Pickering

    ————–

    I swim the river wide
    Hoping to find you inside
    This new life.

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  • What is Meditation and How to Do it Properly?

    You just practice letting thoughts come without having an emotional reaction to them.

    This is the key at first, and why it’s better to limit it to 20 minutes or maybe 30 minutes at first. We’re so conditioned to having an emotional reaction to our thoughts, that it is a little exhausting and intimidating to allow yourself to have the attitude of letting them come out of their cage, letting them have free reign, if you will. That’s the irony or perhaps paradox of meditation: it’s not about stopping your thoughts, it’s about setting them free. And then the practice is: to observe them without having an emotional reaction to them. And that takes some work, especially at first, because in many cases, some more so than others, our thoughts are intimately intwined or tied to an emotion. With some thoughts it almost feels like our emotion is inseparable from them. But with practice even the most “nuclear force like bound” emotion-thought duo will gradually loosen, and that in itself releases a lot of negative energy stored up in your system. And that’s a place from which a lot more options become available (“Doors start opening in places we never even knew doors existed”) and lot more happiness has the chance to get in.

  • The Purpose of Mythology

    The purpose of mythology is to make you realize that your ego is keeping you from your destiny.

    Maybe we shouldn’t say “your” ego because that emphasizes the sense of separateness that the ego function engenders. The definition of ego is the belief, or rather, the sense that you are separate from the outside world, from nature.

    So, its purpose is to break that lock and allow the “waters” of the universe to flow back through you, and the breath (the Tchi) of the universe to once again fill your lungs. Just as your physical body would die without water and air, so your “subtle” body (what we in the West may call ‘Soul’) will die without the ‘divine’ water and air. Because, though, it is wrapped in a story that may be historical untrue, rationally untrue, it contains within it the kernel or seed of a transcendent truth. It’s this very transcendence, the “womb of creation” as Deepak calls it, that’s made, and continues to make, everything we know. It’s desire is to come up through you and “marry” these two worlds, that of the internal and that of the external.

    Your ego stands exactly in this middle ground between this external infinity (which our telescopes show us) and this internal infinity (which our microscopes show us), and also this transcendent infinity, which our heart shows us. There’s a trinity for you. A trinity that wants to be “Re-Ligio” or relinked, which are the Latin words that our English word Religion, synonymous with Mythology, actually comes from.

    So think about this. Religion actually means to “re-link.” It’s the re-linking of eternity with immanence.

    “There’s something that wants to be known, a presence.” 

    See, that something, which is real and transcendent, can’t be known when an Ego function serves as a sort of ringed fortress, blocking it out.

    So the purpose of the mythology, religion, is to break that Ego sphere, and allow the transcendental to pour forth, both up from within, like a hidden spring, and down from without, like a great waterfall or rain.

  • How to Meditate – Post #3

    “Yoga [meditation] is the (intentional) stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff.” – Yogasutras 1.2

    “Throw open the gates, put self aside, bide in silence, and the radiance of the spirit shall come in and make its home.” – Kuan Tzu, P’ien 36

    “When you enlarge your mind and let go of it,
    When you relax your [qi ?] vital breath and expand it,
    When your body is calm and unmoving:
    And you can maintain the One and discard the myriad disturbances.
    You will see profit and not be enticed by it,
    You will see harm and not be frightened by it.
    Relaxed and unwound, yet acutely sensitive,
    In solitude you delight in your own person.
    This is called “revolving the vital breath”:
    Your thoughts and deeds seem heavenly.” Kuan Tzu (24, tr. Roth 1999:92)

    To me it feels like every thought we have is blocking out our true nature. It’s also blocking out what would be a true life experience: both because the inner self can’t get out, and the outer life is blocked from showing forth its true nature and transcendence. “The Kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, yet men do not see it.” Thus every thought we have is distracting us from the ‘real show’ or ‘real adventure’ of our lives, which is our destiny. It’s like the Polynesian saying, “We spend our time fishing for minnows, all the while standing on a whale.” The “minnows” are thoughts, distractions, making us ignorant of the “whale” of our true nature, our true destiny, which is something much bigger than we ever imagined, and much more interesting than the sideshow of the mind trying to catch “little minnows.”

    The sublimity of our essence is trying to make itself known both from within and from without. Thoughts are blocking that “knowingness.”  This is the reason for the practice of yoga, or what we call meditation. To re “yoke” this awareness which would initiate a marriage of the eternal with the imminent.

    “There’s something that wants to make itself known, a presence.”

    “No one has yet lifted my veil.”

  • A New Poem: Go Through The Hills

    Go Through the Hills

    by Stephen Pickering

    You are my tree.
    because you have set me free.
    An orchard garden grows
    on land that once only snowed.

    I’m under a spell
    Only Ishtar can undo
    Down, down her Roman well
    I’m falling too.

    I am the bird.
    My life is the worm.
    I see her cold, dark eye
    bury me in the blood red sky.

    There’s a tick.
    The doors unlock.
    I’m just a hick,
    but I know when angels knock.

    I don’t deserve this.
    But here I am:
    An Italian mist
    Where Dante swam.

    There’s a nickel sky,
    and a lone star.
    Gray clouds cry
    wondering where you are.

    That girl will come.
    I feel her blinking again.
    A bouncing little Sun.
    She knows exactly where I am.

    These beings inside
    If you climb their stare
    Feed the stillness of the night,
    the castle that’s always been there.

    I cannot breathe.
    Your eyes are the hidden stone.
    The gateless gate to the golden stream.
    Unfold the night no man’s known.

    ©2013 Stephen K. Pickering