Gaia: Creative YOU - Words that speak

Re: Write in your journal/blog

http://notthisnotthat.gaia.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:12:36 GMT

Write about the laziness then. I find that things flow when I pay attention to what is actually here, now. And there is ALWAYS something here now, maybe even just the emptiness.

Write in your journal/blog

http://jodi.gaia.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:24:16 GMT

I have recently started (once again) keeping my journal regularly. I am very lazy at it sometimes. But forcing myself to do this, not only helps my writing, but also inspires and focuses me in everyday situations. It truly is a great way to sort out your mind, learn about yourself and keep going.

If I don't know what to write about: I start simply by writing about what happened to me that day. This always stirs some emotions and thoughts. It is such a wonderful way to think and meditate over your day and the way you experience things.
Try it! :)

Re: Graphic Novel In The Works

http://jodi.gaia.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:08:58 GMT

Hi ~KES,

Thank you for sharing this book with us. It sounds like it could be a great help in sorting out the basics when writing.

Re: Graphic Novel In The Works

http://kathysmith.gaia.com — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:45:37 GMT

John Truby has great books on story structure

with a formula that works in any genre. I use

all of the tools he has when reading for a studio.

Re: The One Word Challenge. Let's start now.

http://peacehealer.gaia.com — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:10:41 GMT

multi-verse (as in dimensions beyond the universe)

Re: The One Word Challenge. Let's start now.

http://freehugworld.gaia.com — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:45:45 GMT

My word suggestion: "Door"

The One Word Challenge. Let's start now.

http://prinzecharmin.gaia.com — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:00:15 GMT

http://pods.gaia.com/jdpoetry1/discussions/view/299352

The One Word Challenge. Let's start now.

Hey everyone. I have developed the One Word Challenge on my myspace and other community sites. The mission is to allow others to see how one word can make a difference. Let me show you how. Please tell me one word and I will use it as a topic in a poem written by me.

This may seem hard, but it took practice, motivation and creativity throughout the past two years. I would like to influence others to do the challenge but for now, I shall show you the method. Please, anyone, suggest a word and I'll write a poem. Thanks for your support.

If you would like to read recent work in the past few days,
please check out the pod link above. I will be hosting the
"One Word Challenge"
here and there.

Thanks.

Re: Just Released

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:50:53 GMT

Sounds good to me. I'll be sure to get my hands on it.

Just Released

http://bobbloom.gaia.com — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:18:20 GMT

Taming the Tiger of Emotion: A Radical Change of Mind; reveals the five essential skills, not taught in school, required to create work and a life that you'll love.

Yearning to create work and a life that he'd love, and in a space of deep gratitude, Bob Bloom sat down one day and surrendered his fears to Spirit. "Show me," he said, "I don't care if you blow me up! I have to know what's possible!"

What unfolded next was a ten-year, inner-guided curriculum that would show him, step-by-step, how to manifest a life he would truly love; not through struggle or hardship, but by mastering a few simple skills. These skills included: learning to calm the mind and emotions even in the most challenging situations ...developing an open and willing attitude ...learning to forgive ...developing 'heart-centered' awareness ...and learning to 'think values'. Once he understood and embraced these skills, life ceased to be a struggle. Instead, it became a joy.

If creating work and a life that you'll love is an unrealized dream of yours, you'll want to read this book. It offers simple concepts and a process for their implementation, and it's a process that works. Reader Sherri Riddle wrote, "It's a classic. I just don't know what else to say. It's just a classic!" Reverend Kyra Baehr say's, "Wow! This book is ‘power packed' and very user friendly! Find out more at http://www.tamingthetiger.us/

Graphic Novel In The Works

http://dave.gaia.com — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:06:17 GMT

One of my creative projects that has been brewing from within is a graphic novel. I don't want to disclose too much right now- just for the sake of my own focus. It will more or less be anime style (think japanese manga) but with a cool art style (which will be in color).

I have consulted a few colleages for resources that might help with inspiration and structure- which lead me to ordering this book on amazon.

Totally psyched to read it- but was wondering if anyone had any suggestions?

Thanks!

NMD

Re: Give Yourself the Gift of LUKE

http://leigh.gaia.com — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:32:09 GMT

If you'd like to spread the good word about the FREE offer of Beginner's Luke, just copy the linked banner below and help “Share the Adventure!” by pasting it liberally in your blogs, emails, and websites! Thanks!

Note on the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series

http://lukesoloman.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:04:01 GMT

The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime begins. Request your FREE copy today!

“BEGINNER'S LUKE to a conventional novel is what an animated film is to a documentary. It is creative, imaginative, humorous and very distinctive.” –Reader Views

Sol Luckman

NOTE ON THE SERIES

The reader who likes words has come to the right place. You, my lucky friend, are pages away from encountering whole sentences, paragraphs, chapters and (for the intrepid) entire new books full of words! Some make sense, some almost do, some seem painstakingly selected, others appear to take wing and escape the net of editorial control, crosshatching these white sheets like crow tracks on snow: visually interesting but devoid of sense.

Allow me, Sol Luckman, or if you prefer, Luke Soloman—in any case the presumed “author” of the “novels” that make up the Beginner’s Luke Series—I say, allow me to be the first to break it to you you’ll find only words here. If by chance you happen to be one of those unfortunate readers who look for “real” people and situations in books, you’re hopelessly naïve, but that’s another subject.

More to the point, you risk becoming seriously disconcerted and coming down with a crippling case of narrative vertigo, as the personages and events depicted herein make absolutely no pretense to so-called reality, content as they are to dispense with the notion of reality once and for all and come to life, so to speak, in textuality.

This includes yours truly. I’m arguably the least real of all my characters, a state of affairs for which I make no apologies, being, indeed, altogether proud of the fact. I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages. What follows, in six extraordinary books, is the uncut, uncensored and unbelievable true story of my imaginary life. Enjoy.

Who would you be if you could be anyone? go anywhere? do anything? Well, you can! Luke Soloman will show you how.

BEGINNER'S LUKE is the first novel in a series of six madcap adventures that, collectively, make up the imaginary life of this lovably irreverent modern-day Walter Mitty. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world.

A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist in addition to dozens of prestigious award winners, recently offered the author a contract (subsequently declined in favor of an experiment in self-publishing) for the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series, which made it out of a yearly slush pile of nearly 8,000 manuscripts. One early reader confided, ”I've had quite a journey ever since you shared BEGINNER'S LUKE with me. I'm more careful, these days, when someone gives me a book. I haven't been the same since reading it, as if I contracted the disease of restlessness and have spent months reconsidering every facet of my life. Your novel changed me forever and I blame you for it.”

Currently, the author is giving away the first 2012 copies of BEGINNER'S LUKE. To take advantage of this totally FREE offer, click here.

New Age City

http://sol.gaia.com — Mon, 21 May 2007 19:24:55 GMT

The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime begins. Request your FREE copy today!

New Age City (from BEGINNER'S LUKE)

It all began with a mysterious fire in my belly, a burning desire to go everywhere, meet everyone, see and do everything. It began with a life-or-death decision to remove the Needle of False Security from my arm, turn away from the Medusa of Routine, part the Veil of Bogus Guarantees and pass on into that vital place where, regardless of the question, all you have to say is yes.

It began with the Wisdom of Foolishness, a commitment to remain fluid, receptive, in process, part of the Membrane of Things as I struck out on that spiritual Route 66, the Experience Trail, determined to follow it to the end. It began with yours truly spontaneously ceasing to be myself and becoming someone else, assuming in the blink of an “I” the role of a drifter, a rolling stone, a wayward mariner lone and visionary on the High Seas of Chance and Possibility.

Actually, it began with a grueling Trailways bus trip since that was all I could afford with the money I'd probably stolen–three forgettable, sweaty, malnourished, backbreaking days and nights west from wherever across the tedious interstates of America. Feeling greasier than a TV dinner, I ended up in California in a town called New Age City, which seemed an appropriate starting point, a promising beginning for what I considered the dawning of my own “new age.”

New Age City was a kaleidoscopic pastiche of architectural designs that simultaneously delighted and bewildered. Gothic spires and modernist high-rises towered over straw-bale houses, adobes, log cabins, tepees, earthships and yurts, next to which Buddhist temples, dojos, mosques and shiny Bauhaus edifices competed for space, while the storefronts featured everything from rococo façades and stained-glass art nouveau awnings to medieval placards and flashing neon signs.

My impression, shouldering my trusty old buffalo leather duffel bag (containing the essentials: toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, spare underwear and Swiss army knife)–I say, my impression stepping down from the bus and squinting into the bright sunlight that first May morning was that the driver had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and dropped me off on Mars. And I wasn't far off the mark, as I soon found myself whistling along Mercury Street into the heart of downtown.

***

The only way to convey my initial reaction to New Age City is to compare it to that pinch-me disbelief a kid feels visiting Disneyland the first time. There was no dirt in New Age City. No crime. No drugs. No graffiti. No youth gangs since there were no youths. No class issues since there were no classes. No racist slurs, sexist jokes, rightwing slogans or homophobic propaganda.

Wherever you looked everything was in pristine condition, and the parks were safe and clean, and all the cars were late-model imports, and all the people were white and over forty and expensively dressed even when dressed down, and the restaurants (though exorbitant) featured multicultural menus on recycled paper, and you could always get a decaf mocha latte even in a convenience store at midnight, and those who drank drank in moderation, and those who smoked smoked only American Spirits, and the police themselves were paragons of environmental consciousness as they rode smiling on shiny mountain bikes up and down exquisitely maintained streets.

And the extraordinary services! New Age City was a cornucopia of Transsexual Breathwork, Colonic Hypnotherapy, Psychotic Readings, Women's Foot Massage Circles, Men's Menstrual Networks, Nymphomatic Drainage, Applied Tautology, Body Piercing for the Inner Child, Alternative Unbirthing, Soul Upheaval, Past Life Digressions … To say nothing of the extraordinary products available through independent distributors of network marketing companies: Self-esteem Creams, Psychic Gels, Clairvoyant Eyedrops, Aboriginal Aphrodisiacs, Ostrich Feather Energy Bars, Irradiated Healing Clays, Chai Enemas …

I didn't know where to start. I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I'd just been born? On the other hand I thought it might be interesting to try a flavored enema or have my nasal septum pierced.

Confusing as my options were, it soon became crystal clear the little cash I had on me wouldn't last long in a place where a bag of peanuts cost ten bucks. So what if they were organic.

My first instinct was to get a job–an idea immediately followed by a crippling wave of nausea. I literally vomited in a trashcan on the sidewalk where I'd been pleasantly window-shopping. I found the idea of a job repulsive. Life was too short to waste being a productive member of society. My job was my imaginary life, and I felt deeply I should be paid to live it.

Such a conviction did nothing to put food in my belly or a roof over my head. The hotels and B&Bs were so expensive one weekend would have bankrupted me. It didn't take long for my homelessness to sink in. It just took shivering night after night on a park bench only to be mercilessly prodded awake at five by a smiling policeman urging me to move on; pissing in the woods, shitting in the bushes and wiping with leaves I prayed weren't poison ivy; then finally spending my last penny and feeling genuine hunger set in as a layer of sweat and scum encased me like a second skin.

And so, as is conventional in such cases, I resorted to begging. Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it's a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.

Granted, I was no master–but I seriously doubt Helen Keller could have pried any change out of the citizens of New Age City. I tried every trick in the book. I stood and begged, sat and begged, lay down and begged, begged on my knees. I drew little signs indicating I was unemployed, I was retarded, I was a starving artist, I was an orphan, I was deaf or blind or mute, I suffered from dengue fever, I had a broken heart. I changed locations and times. I faked whiplash, a fractured femur, an abscessed tooth. I moaned and groaned, gnashed my teeth and wailed as I sat impossibly twisted on the sidewalk. I even squirted ketchup swiped from a deli all over my jeans and complained of intestinal bleeding. But nothing, I mean nothing worked! Nobody gave me a dime. People practically walked on top of me without even looking in my direction.

Morning after morning the smiling policeman politely prodded me awake, and day after day my hunger hollowed me out from the inside. I no longer gave a damn about my inner child. How long would it be, I wondered, before I completely withered, turned to a crisp, lost my marbles and took to conversing with myself in different octaves in my own little one-man play scripted by misery's lunacy?

***

One especially traumatic afternoon I found myself seated on the sidewalk in the middle of Mercury Street being ignored by streams of polite people who managed to be cold as distant stars, so engrossed in their own “process” (a word I often overheard them use) that–this is what occurred to me–if the Good Lord Himself had suddenly materialized in a blinding flash, the situation would have been no different from that story where Christ returns to Waco, Texas, but nobody lifts a pinky to receive Him. I remember slumping sideways following this realization and crying a salty tear or two, no longer hungry (that had thankfully passed) but bitterly disillusioned.

Later that night, stretched on my park bench in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, yet miserably unable to sleep, I realized I had to escape. I had to get out of that plastic place–even if it meant perishing in the attempt.

The problem was how. How could a beggar get out of New Age City? Not by hitching, that was for sure. Nobody would give you the time of day, much less a ride. Speaking of, where were all the beggars? Surely I wasn't the first drifter to show up expecting to live off the generosity of such an enlightened place.

Sleep being out of the question, I decided to go for a stroll to brainstorm. It must have been around three and besides yours truly not a creature was stirring. At that hour New Age City resembled a stage set more than a real city, a nearly convincing theater backdrop, the buildings two-dimensional like crushed cardboard boxes. As if they weren't solid, as if you could pass your hand through them with no effort.

This impression, strange as it was, persisted and actually grew stronger the longer I walked through the deserted streets where a surreal, pastel twilight prevailed. By the time I arrived at the outskirts of town, dawn was shooting yellow jags up through the inky sky. But instead of feeling gladdened by the new day, a wave of panic washed over me. I was certain another day in New Age City would be the end of me.

Panting with terror, feeling daybreak fry me like a vampire, squeeze me like a trap room in a B movie, I did something that in any other town would have resulted in a broken nose: I turned and plunged headlong into the nearest wall. Instead of stone I passed through something that felt like water but wasn't wet. When I reemerged, I was no longer in New Age City.

I didn't know where the heck I was–just that I was alone in a dark alley that smelled like piss and rotten beer. I leaned back against the alley wall (a solid one this time) and took a few deep breaths, disoriented but happy to be alive.

But just to make sure, I pinched myself (it hurt) and tried out my vocal chords. “Echo?” I yelled into the shadows.

“Echo? Echo? Echo?” the shadows replied.

Who would you be if you could be anyone? go anywhere? do anything? Well, you can! Luke Soloman will show you how.

Currently, the author is giving away the first 2012 copies of BEGINNER'S LUKE. To take advantage of this totally FREE offer, click here.

POEM: BRIDGES

http://alexnoble.gaia.com — Mon, 14 May 2007 05:04:42 GMT

I feel as though I am thinking your thoughts again. This happens often these days. You are perhaps reading this on a train. I would like to write many things to you, but realize my letters might not be delivered, even if I use beautiful, rare stamps. You are looking out the window now at Monet's haystacks in early morning light, in snow, in blue shadows. We are resigned to our respective solitudes. I went to a movie last week about Carthusian monks, who live in silence. All of us live in silence, but some silences, like ours, are deeper than most. I never know when I will hear from you again. It is all a mystery. You are an enchanted forest, a castle perilous, a calm lake in the wilderness of my extraordinary life. Ah, now you are crossing Van Gogh's famous bridge at Arles, now you are passing through apple orchards in full bloom. We are crossing a bridge, we are always crossing bridges, you and I. We cross bridges in search of the journey, the deep self. I am here, writing these lines, gardenias from the garden on my desk, owls patrolling the late night woods. When you return to your office, my poems and letters will crash around you like friendly waves, surrounding you with light, or grief, or longing. It is in this sense that words are dangerous - always the surprise of them. Bridges. This is what the rain means: we all love somebody else, we know it, we know it. When we met, for that hour in the cafe in Cap D'Antibes, (did I dream that?), I couldn't get enough of the sound of your voice.

Alex Noble

An Excerpt from 23CN: “The Book of Forbidden Poems”

Please visit DIVING DEEPER: A Writing Workshop,

and CAMP HAPPINESS: A Weekly Blogazine

Samsara (from THE TOY BUDDHA)

http://sol.gaia.com — Sat, 12 May 2007 19:46:11 GMT

SOL LUCKMAN

But first things first. The day after my would-be shopping spree, I decided to catch some lunchtime pickup action at Wooly Gym. Not having so much as touched a roundball in over six weeks, I was rustier than an old nail and couldn’t have hit water if I’d pissed off a dock. I really didn’t care, though. It just didn’t seem to matter anymore. I was learning to live with failure, becoming less of a perfectionist.
    After four or five games I nevertheless hoped to forget, I walked out of the gym into an unexpected snowstorm. Tiny pelletlike flakes were bouncing everywhere, frenetically ricocheting off everything, generating an ambient hissing sound like Rice Krispies in milk. The sidewalks were already covered with grainy slush. What possessed me to leave them and walk back to my dorm the long way through the woods (something I never did) I don’t know. My motives weren’t premeditated but impulsive, beyond logical explanation.
    Snow pitter-pattered down through the pines as I sucked deeply on the invigorating air that gave me a York Peppermint Patty sensation. In my mind’s eye I was whisked back to Chetaube County, to my imaginary childhood spent wandering through nearly identical woods, building tree houses and snowmen, catching lizards and crawdads in the creeks and hunting for arrowheads down in old Mr. Deyton’s tobacco fields.
    I visualized a twelve-year-old me sneaking into Mr. Deyton’s barn and climbing up into the rafters to the crawl space just below the warped tin roof where, foreshadowing the sex-starved nineteen-year-old I would become, I could enjoy at length the stash of Penthouse magazines I kept hidden there—
    What was that lying just off the path up ahead? Impossible. It couldn’t be. Could it? Good God, what if it was!
    With epic foreshadowing, a sense of History in the Making, I approached and knelt beside the lumpy, snow-covered form. My heart fluttered and my hand trembled as I reached out and tentatively brushed away the snow. Underneath, sure enough, was the raped and pillaged corpse of what had once been a silver Vespa.
    Her engine, seat and wheels had been stripped clean, but there was surprisingly little damage to her frame, hardly any rust at all. Running my fingers along her sleek skeleton, electric pulses raced up and down my spine. I was overcome with a powerful, soul-to-marrow urge to restore her and make her my very own.

Which was precisely what I did. I won’t trouble you with the details, how I telephoned Dante and enlisted his help, and how a day later he showed up in Yoda with a garage’s worth of tools having grown a bright red fungus of a beard that made him look like one of Santa’s helpers, and how, hearing his knee-high knock, I opened the door to find him standing there with a gremlin grin holding a case of Southern Comfort nearly as big as he was, and how he wondered if I’d lost weight and I said I’d gained a few pounds, and how he’d started working third shift making lingerie at Lipton Hill Hosiery and dating someone named, of all things, Beatrice, who was almost four years older and nearly three feet taller, and how I made him promise not to go and get himself hitched, marriage being the supreme antisocial act, and how, Egbert temporarily shelving his bitterness to join us, it was almost like old times the three of us cooped up together like hysterical sardines with laughter in our bellies and mischief on our minds, and how we drank record-breaking quantities of alcohol and smoked superhydraulic bowl after bowl of happy homegrown courtesy of Dante while grooving to REM and the B52s—
    Allow me to interject that one of Penny Genet’s critiques of my first story, of which there were several I failed to mention, was that it contained too many references to pop culture: Tatum O’Neill, Rod Stewart, Joan Baez, Neil Young … The list goes on. Her point was such allusions were ephemeral, period-bound, likely to be lost on future audiences, that serious writers should stick to universals. I apologize in advance to any member of a future audience who has never seen The Bad News Bears. I realize missing that reference has ruined your experience of this series, that not knowing the words to “Muskrat Love” dealt a devastating blow to your ability to follow the complex chain of symbolism that links the Captain & Tenille to the B52s to the Buddha and ultimately to the Amazon Rainforest. Sorry.
—and how Dante was all ears to hear about my collegiate experience but principally the parties I’d attended, the drugs I’d done and the girls I’d met, and how I told him about Halloween but for some reason left out Vanessa, and how it occurred to me I was the only one of the three of us still sexually inactive, a fact I tried desperately to hide, and how I also failed to mention I was considering dropping out of college, how it suddenly seemed the right thing to do, how I felt I’d accomplished whatever it was I’d come there for, and how, after a week of debauchery, we finally got around to lugging the Vespa up out of the woods, and how, the room transforming overnight into a mad scientist’s laboratory, it was such a joy to watch Dante work, his fat greasy little fingers agile as waterstriders performing mechanical miracles with parts and tools, how I mostly stayed out of his way but did weld on the very last piece, a chrome rearview mirror, and how we christened her simply but elegantly the Vespa while smashing a bottle of Asti Spumante across her svelte gas tank, and how, with a fresh coat of metallic silver, she was a real eyeful, candy for the optic nerve, how I couldn’t have been prouder if she’d been my girlfriend, and how, Egbert slipping back into a misanthropic mood, the incarnation of bad energy, Dante and I slipped outside ostensibly to get away from the paint fumes but really to avoid Egbert and, emerging into that hour of winter twilight just before dark when the sky is red marble and it’s the earth that appears ethereal, a blood sunset for blood brothers, we didn’t even talk but just stood side by side in the shivering cold sharing a heaping bowl filled with each other and the excitement of the Moment as the smoke mellowed our brains and night dropped its curtain and the streetlamps cast our cartoon shadows, ridiculously squat and ludicrously elongated, against the balcony wall.

Technically, since the Vespa was classified as a motorcycle (as opposed to a moped), I should have gone through the onerous, demeaning process of getting a North Carolina tag and driver’s license with a motorcycle endorsement. But ever since imagining myself into existence, I’ve suffered from a life-threatening allergy to bureaucracy, one that sends me into anaphylactic shock whenever I so much as come into contact with red tape. Besides, having been a pedestrian so long, there was something almost disloyal about acquiring a license. But luckily, I purchased a helmet.
    Dante hung around long enough to witness my first ride—the beginning of it anyway. He seemed nearly as moved as I was when the engine cranked on the very first try and purred in idle as I checked the gauges, switched on the headlight and kicked up the kickstand before pulling on the throttle and burning rubber down the street.
    It was late evening and the air was colder than a frozen shitcicle, penetrating in seconds to my bones despite my heavy winter coat and insulated underwear. But I wasn’t about to allow such a trifling consideration as frostbite to ruin my maiden outing.
    I cruised across campus into town as the city lights winked on, then headed out toward Chatterton County as a frosty sickle moon levitated above the horizon, and finally zipped back along the winding country roads under the cold twittering starry night sky. The life that lives in motion, the life that is motion, the way motion erases our stasis physical and otherwise, speeds up our molecules, makes us fluid, smelts down our old patterns only to reforge us at journey’s end into a purer, cleaner version of ourselves. To this day that first ride on the Vespa ranks near the top of my list of memorable scenes. Never before had I felt so cinematic, so made for the big screen.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been aware—obsessively—of the candid camera filming my imaginary life. For me the myth of Narcissus is no myth. At times I could practically turn around and grab my personal camera by the lens—it seems so close, so real.
    Pure folly. Won’t ever happen. The camera’s much quicker than I am. But I know it’s there because I’m forever playing to an offstage director who alternately praises and pans my performance. Little does it matter this director is merely an extension of myself. On an epistemological level we’re as different as we are similar ontologically, and in any case we depend on each other for our mutual existence. Such is the Catch-22, the Möbius strip, the Escher print of self-consciousness: to be both star in and critic of one’s own movie.
    And so it was that, literally, I watched myself exit the dorm and climb on the Vespa that late February afternoon. Dante had long since returned to Beatrice, but I’d spent the past two weeks in the Misery Loves Company Suite with Egbert, who’d spent the past two weeks complaining incessantly with characteristic pomposity about the rotten state of his affairs, pacing the floor delivering variations on the same maddening speech complete with Shakespearean gesticulations.
    “I don’t mean to sound elitist, Luke, though I am. I no longer have either the luxury of denial or the comfort of asylum. I’m like a great eagle born, bred and made strong all the while tethered to the sad earth and now finally ready for flight but feeling the constant telluric tug of an adamant ball-and-chain! Why have I allowed myself to play such archetypal roles: Adam, Samson, Holofernes, John the Baptist?
    “I feel exhausted, emptied of everything but my poisons—to the point that hope itself has become arduous. Last night I dreamt Cindy had taken on a fistful of lovers to spite me. Adonis himself would have had his head served up on a platter by her! The little bitch.
    “Have you ever noticed how certain women must kill in order to live? I won’t go into the gory details of our breakup. Suffice it to say it was very loud and swift and had to do with her unwillingness to hear my needs versus my willingness to hear hers.
    “Why does she have to fuck other people, Luke? Is that not the central question? If only I could shake off the cruel fetters of jealousy that have been forged around me! If only I could break the iron grip of unhappy circumstance and slay the memory of the foul harpy that feasts daily on my artist’s soul!”
    In short, he came within inches of driving me criminally insane. But though I let him push me to it, I didn’t let him nudge me over the edge. I went out of my way to be cheerful and supportive—except for one time when I slipped and said, “Look, Egbert, if I really put my mind to it, I might be able to care less”—and even changed my note on the door as I was leaving that afternoon to a more positive (if equally vague) one: I’m somewhere doing something and will be back sometime. Leave a message.
    Lately, the weather had been full of personality. The past few days alone, it had gone from bone-cold to a winter wonderland to so balmy you could get by with a Speedo to a torrential downpour early that morning to an afternoon with springlike shadows rippled with golden lesions of sunlight. One of those afternoons that can’t seem to make up their mind, teetering between winter and spring, dark and light, an indecisive afternoon waffling between tree-tossing winds and toasty sunshine.
    I watched myself turn right onto Jefferson, the wind playing like a soundtrack in my ears, then hang a left onto Pendleton at Carthage Milk. I had no particular destination in mind; I was simply getting away from Egbert, blowing off some steam, enjoying my two-wheel mobility.
    It wasn’t as if I needed an excuse to be out riding. I’d made a point, weather permitting, of riding every day. It was the only thing that kept me from murdering Egbert. Outwardly jovial as I might have been, I confess I got no small pleasure contemplating the front-page headline of the Daily Toe Jammer: SKIDMORE SCHOLAR BRAINS ROOMMATE WITH CROWBAR.
    At the bottom of Pendleton I turned right onto Thyme, then immediately right again onto Mephisto headed back toward campus. I remember thinking I was making a lopsided circle, which I was, then I realized I was near Billy’s house, which brought Halloween to mind, then the wackiest thing happened: I started tripping right there in the saddle—I mean tripping—pins, needles, flashing lights, spinal tremors, the works. As surely as I’d ever felt anything, I could feel the Spirit or my Ally or whatever you want to call it possessing me again.
    And then, for the second time, I saw the Buddha. Glimpsing him out of the corner of my eye, I knew instinctively he was the same Buddha that had passed by Billy and me at the end of Halloween. But now, instead of riding in the back of a pickup driven by someone who may or may not have been Blue, he was sitting alone in someone’s front yard under an elm tree.
    He had the same ambivalent smile, the same drowsy eyes, the urna, the belly, the familiar pose, the radioactive glow. The little sucker was definitely alive this time because he was talking to me. But the strangest thing was: he spoke with Blue’s foghorn voice!
    “LUKE, MY MAN, I WANT YOU TO LISTEN CLOSE. YOU LISTENIN’?”
    Was it all in my head? Or was this actually happening? Stupid questions, it occurred to me, for someone who invented his reality.
    “I’m listening.”
    “GOOD. I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER SOMETHIN’, SOMETHIN’ REAL IMPORTANT. YOU PROMISE TO REMEMBER?”
    “I promise.”
    “YOU CAN’T TRAVEL THE PATH ’TIL YOU’VE BECOME THE PATH.”
    “What?”
    “I’VE SPOKEN.”

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly life’s important episodes are over. During my vision—or whatever—I’d drifted into the oncoming lane. The next thing I knew I was staring down the business end of a beige Cadillac driven by a fossilized Southern belle with a Marge Simpson bouffant every bit as freaked as I was.
    We were both going about thirty miles an hour, which made for a combined sixty-mile-per-hour collision. The camera captured it all: the alarmed expressions, the desperate application of the brakes on both sides, the skidding, the screams, the crack of impact, the Vespa folding like an accordion as its frail rider flew over the handlebars into the grill of the Cadillac then flipped three hundred and sixty degrees over the Cadillac only to splatter on the pavement in a sickening, contorted mass of road burger.
    Such was the external image. Inside, tumbling through the air like clothes in a drier, I watched with serenity as my imaginary life passed before my eyes, scene smoothly dissolving into scene until, barely a nanosecond later, I was back in the present and again staring down the barrel at death.
    “This must be what the Buddha meant by becoming the path,” I remember saying to myself philosophically as I plummeted like an out-of-control aircraft, end over smoking end, into a terrific crash with no burn. The feeling, verging on the absence of one, wasn’t even painful.
    Then sounds. Car doors opening, footsteps approaching, urgent voices—one, masculine and oddly familiar, yelling for someone to call an ambulance; another, feminine with a Southern accent, hysterically repeating, “Oh God! Oh dear sweet Jesus! I believe he has left his body!”
    Then silence.
    And then nothing.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF THE BUDDHA SUDDENLY REAPPEARED?

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF HE SUDDENLY DIDN'T?

The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime began with Beginner's Luke, an instant “underground classic” that has met with rave reviews worldwide. Now Luke is back and better than ever in this stand-alone, mock-epic, enlightening spoof of all things held sacred in American culture. Read reviews.

WARNING: May cause vertigo, euphoria, lunatic laughter. May cause you to get angry, see things in a whole new way, ask questions, quit your job, slug your boss, cheat on your spouse, screw the IRS, expose the truth behind 9/11 because we all know they did it. May fundamentally alter you so the old rules no longer apply, so it's okay if clothes become optional, okay to make love not war, okay to set fire to your country club, dig up your neighborhood golf course, plant an organic garden and build your new community one puff at a time …

POEM: TIME ZONES

http://alexnoble.gaia.com — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:44:06 GMT

Posted on May 9th, 2007 by AlexNoble

time zones

my day draws down

to an indigo close

a cool ocean breeze

breathes through my room

like a blessing

a chorus of frogs

welcomes in the night

your day now begins

even as mine ends

I see you sitting

in the spring sunlight

outside a small café

in Brussels

sipping a latte

and reading a railroad map

as I am writing these words

you suddenly look up

as though hearing your name

called from a far distance.

I whisper through the time zones,

it’s me, it’s me,

your angel of the morning

and I am beside you, now.

Alex Noble

An Excerpt from 23CN: “The Book of Forbidden Poems”

Please visit DIVING DEEPER: A Writing Workshop,

and CAMP HAPPINESS: A Weekly Blogazine

Digital Art by Alex Noble

THREE POSTCARDS FROM VENICE

http://camphappiness.gaia.com — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:05:45 GMT

Posted on Apr 24th, 2007 by AlexNoble

Venice

C: Missed train to Trieste. Ended up in Venice. Had some additional Active Imagination sessions with Carl (Jung) that I wouldn't have missed for the world. People are quite afraid of him, but if he likes you he is like your own psychological Santa Claus. He told me that when he isn't sure what to do, like take the train to Geneva, he will flip a coin. Heads I take the train to Geneva. Tails I stay home. Let's say it comes up heads. If he is happy about this, he has solved his confusion. If he is unhappy, he finds the information useful to help him decide how he really feels. Of course, many of his students are shocked to see the Great Herr Doktor flipping a coin. But they do not really know how much fun he is. They just see what they want to see. Projection, Carl calls this. We all do it, of course, but if you do it and know that you are doing it, that is better than doing it and not knowing that you are doing it, if you get my drift. For example, I am currently projecting that you are my perfect Muse. But I am conscious of this, so it is OK. And I am telling you about it, which makes it even more OK. And you can “resign” as my Muse any time you wish. Carl says you would be a fool to resign as my Muse of course. Ooops! Running out of space. Will continue on one of my Hotel Cipriani cards, where there's more room. S.

A Poem---"Blue Wine"

http://lacewings.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:34:01 GMT

Sit by the wayside of a sparkling youth,
the ancient menagerie of tired nothingness
trapped in the basement.
Scrounge around for something as simple
as a hat stolen by the butler,
a car waiting on those mountain roads.
My windchimes signal me at night
to wander far and near,
I touch nothing but glass on this precipice.
I love Valentine's Day
when you marry your teddy bear,
your vows somewhat soft
with glitter on the carpet.
I drank blue wine last night
then spit it out into the fire.
Don't recite the alphabet
on a forlorn Sunday night
to echoes of former lovers
hidden from view.
"But it's you," you always said,
I still never reminisce
by firelight,
by moonlight,
under recompense
of stolen suicides
or knives in the back.
Copyright 2007 Linda C. Mortensen

A Journey Through Rivers, Time & Rock

http://alexnoble.gaia.com — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:46:11 GMT

A Journey Through Rivers, Time and Rock

You wake up at 4:30 AM, light the small beeswax candle on your desk, and begin writing. As you write, the images present themselves, like stately emissaries from distant galaxies, bowing, speaking in low voices. There is so much to listen for: the voices of friends who have Gone Ahead, the lyrical voices of Tomorrow and Yesterday and What Might Have Been. In your imagination, you watch the rising sun wash night’s shadows from the sky. You hear the call of a Blue Heron. You remember that enchanted afternoon when you walked through Monet’s garden at Giverney. You feel the chill of the Alaska wind as you look out across miles and miles of ice. All of this happens in your imagination. You hear fragments of songs, broken passages of music: Monteverdi, Ellington, Coltrane, Vivaldi. This, you realize, is the very center of the Universe, the place where Love lives, the silent, musical, dancing stillness, the secret cave at the heart of space-time where everything becomes One, and from which we depart in quantum ships that take us on all our journeys.

Here, at the very center of your silence, you discover and experience images of the love that lives its many lives through you. The lines of your many loves etch themselves across the geography of your memories and dreams the way the Colorado, century after century, whispers its swirling water-brushes along the walls of the Grand Canyon, painting in colors of dawn and sunset the history of rock, time and the river. You nod to these images, as you would acknowledge the presence of angels. You become still and receptive. Your listening is a prayer, a state of grace. You realize that what you are writing is a kind of a love story, and every love story is a journey through rivers and time and rock. And every love story is a journey, with all the silences and mysteries of eternity weaving in and out of its shifts and changes like golden threads in a unicorn tapestry.

The Blue Heron casts his shimmering reflection across the waters of your life. The ice cracks and spring rivers start to flow. The golden celebrations of Vivaldi echo across an Umbrian landscape. Monet’s water lilies fade in and out of the sky. Great glaciers recede, exposing mountains and valleys that have been hidden in a mantle of ice for millions of years. You see and hear all of this, and you feel reborn and new each morning, as your little candle flickers against the fading night. Your silence is like a lover. Your infinite silence holds you in its arms.

Re: Give Yourself the Gift of LUKE

http://leigh.gaia.com — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:59:43 GMT

The opening section of Beginner's Luke appears in the current issue of Europe's popular Metamorphosis ezine.