SamadhiMuse » 1987

1987-01-01

Dennis — Thu, 01 Jan 1987 08:00:00 +0000

         I awoke on the subject of biting my fingers
         to find that I'd been nibbling them for several hours
         since midday when I'd thought, "OK, 1st day of '87
         and I haven't bitten them yet."
         I smiled at myself; these resolutions and siestas.
         Bhagwan's dictum to "watch the thing you want to drop"
         came to me and I reflected that I hadn't held the thought,
         I hadn't kept watching.  Then I wondered "how do you
         practice holding thoughts and I thought of meditation.
         Meditation is exercise for the mental muscles
         to tone them to hold a thought.
         Hence the mantras and the koans.
         Its the fruit of exercise that gives you the power.
         Power to remain awake on as many things
         as you have developed mental muscles to hold.
         And once you can hold what ever thought you wish,
         everything which CAN be changed,
         comes within your grasp.
                           Gallagher
                           01 Jan 1987

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1987-01-02

Dennis — Fri, 02 Jan 1987 08:00:00 +0000

         T. Lobsang Rampa
         must have been shot
         by a spiritual cannon
         loaded with 1300 years
         of Tibetean intent.
         But, in the end,
         spectacular as his rise was,
         he came back to earth.
         For while others
         may give us velocity
         and direction
         we, alone, having nothing
         but mass and inertia
         and our own small flame
         of awareness
         to sustain the flight.
         The spiritual equivalent
         of the roller derby whip.
                     gallagher
                     02 Jan 1987

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1987-01-06

Dennis — Tue, 06 Jan 1987 08:01:00 +0000

            Small worlds, dreams we're passing through,
            mist and light in broken time.
            I love you, and you love me,
            dreams are all we've come to see
            here against the surging tide,
            hearts and hopes are open wide,
            honest, now and then, and then, we've cried
            I know nothing stays the same
            love's an ever finer blade.
            Can't we find the light of love
            among the shifting scenes and pain?
            Time is passing here outside
            and I love this place we've made here inside.
                                       gallagher
                                       1-6 Jan 87
            - to the cadence of 'Love is comin' around again'
              by Joni Mitchell

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1987-01-06

Dennis — Tue, 06 Jan 1987 08:02:00 +0000

            Sparks of love in a material world,
            spirits of light in rivers of change.
            I love you, and you love me;
            hands across a changing sea.
            Sunlight, shafts of gray and blue,
            it's love in our eyes that I can see
            but what do I mean, do I mean, to you?
            I've got dreams and so do you.
            God must have put us here to find
            how our dreams can love the rain.
            Dreams and love, love can bring us pain.
            Love brings us around and around again
            to where we face the light in pain
            to where we find our spirit's name.
            I love you and I just don't care
            I'll follow love and dreams anywhere
            for time is a raging running tide
            washing us away inside our lives.
            I will love you, damn the rain.
            I will love my dreams and damn the pain.
            Love is a shining light to be
            but God never said that love came for free.
                                    gallagher
                                    2-6 Jan 87

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1987-02-10

Dennis — Tue, 10 Feb 1987 08:01:57 +0000


People just 'making' things to validate themselves...
   dancing to give expression to technique,
      making funny faces in the mirrors which reflect us,
         as if art was technique and fad was prediction.

When you begin to close your hands on her waist, then you know.
   When you fingers press and feel her give of warmth and nakedness
      and you begin to smell her hair....

She is not marble or manikin nor is she abstraction or posed.
   Your hands tell you she is real and your feelings sing of it.

And what you feel fills and emptys you like the wheat-fields and the seasons.
   This is the music of mortality and the whisper of infinite mystery.

Let them paint their rocks, dance their techniques and worship idols,
   I will drink at this fount.

Gallagher
10 Feb 1987

— Copyright 1965-2010 by Dennis Gallagher —

1987-02-14 Snap Shots

Dennis — Sat, 14 Feb 1987 08:01:48 +0000


Years ago, I remember driving across the Arizona desert
   and seeing four or five people wearing white sack-cloth
      and walking in the hot sun on the side of the road.

I passed them but turned around and went back driven by curiosity.

They said they were just walking and praying and letting Jesus provide for them
   in every moment ... in every step in the hot sun.

And again in Yosemite in 1972, there was a blond girl from Berkeley
   doing summer service for the National Parks System.
I can see her eyes, her idealism, her uniform....

Moments.   People making a statement in person or on paper.
Flash!  Indelible moments - a deep impression of power and synchronicity.

The book Open Marriage,
   the ideals of the 1960's,
      the beauty of Krishnamurti.

Like pictures cast, solid and whole, onto the waters of time
   they move and shimmer as the river moves
      and finally they dissolve and disappear.

We each, arising from the womb and marching to the grave,
   are a sequences of images strobing against time.
The material side of what we are here for
   is so insignificant.

I remember a bum in Seattle who begged some money from me;
   and all the time his eyes were laughing at my perceptions.

Gallagher
3-14 Feb 1987

— Copyright 1965-2010 by Dennis Gallagher —

1987-07-31

Dennis — Fri, 31 Jul 1987 08:07:19 +0000


This girl whom I love so much is going for it all - and I applaud her.

Against the edge of all darkness and the dissolution of spirit and certainty
   she wanders; a small brave candle.

She seeks understanding and enlightenment,
   she tries to hard and gets frustrated,
she wants the deep knowledge,
   and tries to figure out how to come by it.

In circles and dreams she runs,
   counting beads on the rosary path to heaven,
squeezing knowledge, clamoring with the mind,
   lusting with the heart and fearing with the ego.

And yet ... and yet, my love...

I hear the truth just behind you,
   I see the light you long for shining in you,
and I laugh as you cry because I know
   just how close the truth is.

gallagher
31 Jul 1987
- about Joan

1987-11-20

Dennis — Fri, 20 Nov 1987 08:00:00 +0000



   An early winter evening, motorcycle wind and headlights moving
      through the lights of houses full of warmth.
      I open the door into a dark room ... the sound of running feet.
   She is there with the smell of incense
         lighting candles behind the bedroom door.

   She and George Winston's music play in the candle's light
      and I am deeply touched ... a smile burns.

   I am blessed.  ...see her love, her playfulness, her passion.
       My hands are cold from the dark ride - she enfolds me,
      kisses my neck like the heat from a wood stove in wintertime
   These feelings of intimacy and togetherness;
      I am both spirit and flesh here, transient and imperishable.
      This washes over me.  ...I am loved.

   So many years and so many women, just to gain this vision.
      To be able to see how deep her goodness and sincerity,
         her honest and caring, are.
   I tell her this and she laughs at me
      she says it just takes some of us longer than others
      to see the obvious.

   My feelings well ... beyond the bed and moment ... beyond the page.
      All the secret spaces, soft lights, and warm loving embraces,
      in all the rooms, centuries, countries, cultures and faces....
   These soft moments of intimate reality are,
      are much of what is real
      and worthy in us.
   The rest are only the moments - between the moments
      when we touch and cup the small lights   of God
      which are in each of us.

   But these moments also pass amid jungles ...
      soft eyes ... and bullets ...  the hands of babies ... and death
      mixtures ... light and shadow ... we, who cherish amid destruction.

   People abused, people bought and sold,
      people confused and used,
      people who were once children of light
         now rusting in corruption.
   This world cannot see it's insane.
      I put down the newspaper, Gorbachev's struggle,
      the starving, the criminal, the heartless.
    History rolls up behind my eyes ... so much night waits
      against our small candles, but I remember what is real.
      I, too, will dim the room and burn incense.

   I know what feeds our hearts and spirits;
      the small flames of the Godhead within us.
   Through these many centuries of death and corruption,
      confusions and loss, I will light a candle
      and gather our love and peace against the storm.

                                    gallagher
                                    20 Nov 87

1987-12-16

Dennis — Wed, 16 Dec 1987 08:00:00 +0000

            The winter storm finds me
               watching the trees swaying
                  against a gray and moving sky.

            I feel the Buddha's thought,
            if what he experienced
               could be called a thought,
                  as the trees sway
                  ...continuous, elegant, flowing....

            The raw beauty of it
               rendered on the canvas of no-mind.
            ...being and presence and timelessness...
                  cold and wind, winter and death
                     and beauty all here....

            I watch them sway like they did
               when the mastodons roamed the north
                  and men wore skins.
            Such a small glimmer of focused awareness are we
               amid the turbulence and tumble of existence.

            Identified with our names
               our jobs, our bodies, our personalities
            and our memories
               we go blind almost all the time.

            Surely, those many centuries ago,
               Buddha watched other trees in a storm
            and felt the same benediction and blessing
               of this vision.
            I know his thought
               and feel his joy for a moment.

            But he turned and walked away into the rain,
               and chose to advance openly towards his death.
            And he gave up every fiction and every pose.

            He chose to meet existence in the raw
               and found the roll of God's thunder
            while we sleep
               and barely feel the breeze.

                              gallagher
                              16 dec 87
                              Newport Beach

1987-12-27

Dennis — Sun, 27 Dec 1987 08:00:00 +0000

         If you get a good thought, write it down.
         Meditate on it.
         Our thoughts occur like flashes in dust,
            for a moment we understand and possess
            an awareness...then, unless we can hold it
            we only remember that we knew....
         Our thoughts and understandings are like
         writing in the sand; transient and easily lost.
         Gaining possession of our realizations
         is meditation.
                              Gallagher
                                 27 Dec 87