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It wasn't a particularly an old house but rather a younger home that had seen better days. It sat behind a wall of brush and young trees that served to hide it from the rural highway that went past. The original construction was supplemented with sheets of Styrofoam and collected wood to build a protected porch on the back side of the house. The front door wasn't apparent so I followed the tracks in the snow to the door on that back porch. The interior of that porch felt dark but it was close to nightfall and provided shelter from the wind.

I knocked and a woman who appeared a hundred years old came to the door. I told her why I was there and she didn't believe me. She wanted to see the money. I gave her a single fifty dollar bill and she examined it closely before telling me that it looked fake. I told her it wasn't and that she could keep it if she answered my questions, but was prepared to give it to her if she refused. She then held it up to the light to see the outline of a second president in the bill.

She disappeared for a moment in the house and then returned, dragging a chair which she set by the door. She then sat in it and took out a Benson and Hedges cigarette and lit it up. The rest of our meeting was punctuated by the smell of burning tobacco and the slow death of her lungs. She didn't care, she told me, she was going to be dead soon anyway.

So she told me her story about how when she was young she would imagine that she would leave the place she was and move to the big city and become someone famous, maybe an artist or something. She remembered the day she could read, and how the moment came in such a way that she saw the lines and shapes actually talking.

She searched endlessly to get an opportunity to leave, to go someplace where things could really matter and that she would be in an ocean of humanity that would buoy her creative spirit in the way of community support. But despite the pristine beauty of the north woods there laid a trap. “It was like walking through blackberries,” she aid, “and having the sharp thorns drag at your clothes, saying wait a minute, wait a minute, there's just one more berry over here you have to get. You get aggravated at their tiny thorns but them give in and reach for that luscious ripe berry, and when that happens you realize how you've been trapped by the blackberry patch.”

She worked hard at her one talent—singing–and used this as a vehicle to drive her south to the big city. She loved singing when she was young and know many songs, mostly traditional and some modern ones. When she came to the city she found singing wasn't enough by itself. She managed to get a job as a clerk and worked hard every day and would sing on street corners or small bars at night. She met others like her who could play instruments like a guitar or piano and so she would sing with them.

It was one day when she and her band mates secured a well paying gig at a restaurant and they played there but no one clapped. It wasn't an insult or anything just the nature of the place, the people all caught up in the sophistication of their lives so much that they didn't acknowledge the art laid before them. She then realized that there was nothing here holding her back—that if she wanted to go places she would have to charge this thicket of indifference and thrash about to attract attention and fame. It was kike she traded the soft thorns of a blackberry bush into the hard thorns of a thicket.

It was fall when she returned, she marched through the colorful trees up state until she was deep again in the north woods. There she would only sing in church and found a man and scratched out a family among the trees of the forest and relax at the lake in hot days.

I had her sign my tablet for the $50. She lit up another cigarette and said now she was like the wind, no longer full but only an empty force that really was all the weight of the world.

“You don't believe in karma?” She said. I agreed and she was shocked that someone couldn't believe in something that was, at least to her, a basic truth.

I actually found this kind of failure to comprehend as a common trait among those people who considered themselves to be very spiritual. Usually those folks would assume that all spirituality would follow the general guidelines of their preferred spirituality. When explaining alternatives, as I was wont to do, I would often refer to things in such a way so that the person would more understand the concept. Sometimes I wouldn't know the actual answer but because I believe in truth I would strive to give one anyway. Hence the one time when I explained to some evangelical Christians the Hindi use of astrology.

Of course, most Christians view astrology as some kind of archaic system of divinity that has no place in Christianity. I had to explain to those Christian souls that yes, Hindus look at the stars for guidance but it wasn't the same as the astrology they read in the daily paper. They struggled to make the connection and so one of them said “It's like a prayer?”

Yeah, that is the default answer for some people. It's like a prayer. It covers just about everything.

Time, of course, told me how inaccurately I had addressed that question. I now have a better understanding that Hindu priests use astrology to determine auspicious dates for life events. My new found knowledge would not have changed my answers in the conversations I had, but only make me realize that sometimes I manage to find truth without intending to.

So … karma. It's ultimately a tool that some religions use to crowbar people into making righteous moral decisions. It's really a threat—mess up this time and you're going to have to wait in the Department of Motor Vehicles line forever only to have the clerk reject your driver's license reinstatement due to the fact that you haven't been neutered by a bunch of frenzied kittens.

But yeah, as I so politely told that lady in that worn clapboard house outside of town,it was bullshit. I was there to ask her opinions about politics. At first she was reluctant because she thought I might be offended, but I was being paid to be there and I was ready to pay her for her opinions. I handed her a fifty dollar bill after asking my questions and she said “Wow, my karma is good today!”

So I said “I don't believe in karma.” And look where it got me.

The house I was supposed to go to was one of those Victorian style painted ladies—a large home build a century ago with a large porch, rounded windows and piles upon piles of roofs and windows. Like all painted ladies she was past her prime and had succumbed to the plastic surgery of subdivision. And so it was number two I knocked on.

A woman answered. She obviously was born in the last century and the wool knit cap and colorful shirt she wore told me she was of the hippie mindset of the 60s. I asked her my questions and she gave me answers. She was pleasant and I began to wonder what she was like when she was younger.

“You know,” she said, “I have figured out the place for God in one's life.”

“What do you mean?” I asked

“You see, God is the barrier between the self and not self. Imagine that one is in a sphere. At the core of the sphere is the self, an entity that contains all of the elements of the sense of self one has, including the things that the self perceives around them.”

“Kind of like a planet, you mean?”

“That would be a good analogy.” So the self is planet, mostly inside, but with an exterior exposed to the atmosphere. The atmosphere would represent the world we perceive outside of ourselves, including other people and the physical conditions around us.”

She paused and then continued. “In this case, God is the blue sky above us. When we stand on the suffice and look up all we can see is God, because God is shielding us from the unknown. If we blast off from the surface in a rocket, then the blue sky begins to fade. Once we get beyond that, there is no more God, just space.”

“So there is no God in space?” I asked.

“Only the God you bring with you. If you are able to expand your planetary view to go beyond God, then perhaps. But regardless of what you believe you still have to break through that blue barrier. And even if you do, It'll still be likely to be with you because you will have remembered that it was there at one time.”

When you have a cat around you there is always a point in the day in which you stop whatever you're doing and take a few moments to pet the cat. You might say a few nice words while scratching behind the ears or just quietly stroke their silky fur while the cat does nothing except to accept or sometimes embellish the love by purring and nuzzling your hand. Then you walk away and continue with the agenda that's today but with a warm feeling because you just passed on love to another.

This morning at 2:53 am in a room that was carefully darkened
with the light and hum of electronic machinery
a group of trained cheerleaders
shouting strangely as the sound did not bounce
off the deadened walls
and unknown to passers by
G-d was born.
 
Yet again His forehead was slick with the
water in which he had walked upon
pudgy fingers struggled to quantify
His first score in a long line of tests
that were strangely enough designed
to avoid the issue of his being
the Almighty.
 
Some may suppose the presence of mangers and lambs and hay
but it was truly needles and bleached polyester and cotton
finally here after being lost in 
a bureaucratic maze of insurance
that the coming blessed event
was not marked by a star
but the ritual assigning of
a nine digit number
in place of a name.

I was hitch hiking across country with some companions and we stopped at a bar in Brownsville Texas to make a phone call. Sitting in a corner table was Carl Jung. He had a almost full bottle of blended tequila in front of him and two glasses. I asked him about the collective unconscious. He said “See this room—with the tables? The tables are people's egos.” I looked about the room and there were many tables. Some were clean but others had people sitting at them with different plates and glasses and condiments. He then continued. “The collective id is the floor.” I absorbed and then asked a question: “What about G-d?” Carl smiled and said “This table is your theology, your scripture.” He filled the glasses with tequila and continued, “and G-d is the floor.”

The good sisters that now lie
in the mud beneath my feet
now know evil because
they've seen it
heavier then the stones and earth pressing upon their flesh
or what's left of it
amiable pathway for the verdant vine intertwining
a wired fence
to keep out the curious such as me
from wondering what manner
of soldier sleeps here.

On a certain crisp fall day a kitten ran up to me while I was raking leaves. His tail was in the air and all I had to do to make him purr was scratch around his ears. He was brown with a black nose and tail. He looked at me and asked “Do you know how to change the nature of the universe?”

I looked at him and laughed. “Of course I do. I can do it here and now with my rake.”

“I belong right here,” she said
and stamped her foot upon the soft earth
that ran far beyond where I could see
disappearing into the rolling hills
studded with ripening corn.

“I can teach you,” she cried
the promise of knowledge upon her lips
and distance in her eyes as she
looked beyond her rivers for wisdom
which she would then gather in her breast
and then cast upon the riverbank
like pennies from heaven.

“I will beseech you,” she wailed
in the darkened and lonely night
to bring justice to the children
to bring justice for the children
that eternally spring forth from her womb.

“I will reach you,” she whispered
as my body slowly turns to sand
a part of my own return to the earth
where we melt and become one.

“I will sing a song, my dear,” she promised
A ballad professing the love of every body
in this crisp autumn morning in Iowa
sunlight beyond words abound.

On the occasion to be a banker
holding pennies for the the penniless
copper disks conducting
affluence and gravy with the roast
soft to the butter knife
yet so chewy that it takes hours
just to swallow.

Realizing that it's time to be franker
I count, straightforwardly, the value of accounts
an objective guideline
to establish among us who is truly wealthy
and intercept money not proper
redirecting it to a closet
where it can be found and stolen later.

The afternoon sun makes me a forsaker
willing to stay upon the carefully clipped grass
talking of my past experience
and how it makes me wiser
but not smart enough
to get back into the building
when my break is through.