Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#50: Dear Skye

The Office of Jim Trainer
709 Rio Grande
Austin, TX 78701

Skye N. Downing
305 E 5th St,
Austin, TX 78701

2/21/15, 5:12 PM

Hello Dear-

Windy and warm here on Judge’s Hill.  Kind of weather a man can feel his luck.  Trouble these days ain’t the batshit kind.  Not even little fires need putting out.  Life becomes maintenance of the highest order–a tending to the Self.  No more waiting for God.  We’ll bring him down with our ablutions, our mercy, our work and love.  What’s fallen has fell and the days and nights have no more dire consequence.  We lay down with ourselves. We feel it all acutely now.  The Sacred Path of the Warrior is no panacea.  In fact, the more we open our hearts, the more they will be broke.  The broke part isn’t the point of this journey and  even the point of the journey can change.  That’s what the end of my 30s should bring–an end to my resistance.  A realistic look up&down the row.  Not a “how much” but further.  Not an escape from pain but a way to bring water.

The nights now like jangling phosphorescent jewels.  And the days steely and bright, glimmering at the edge of a knife.  We step up now. This is where the struggle begins. Beyond the self and not at war with the world.  We make our way across the wide canyon.  A single tear is prize when flowing from this overabundance inside.  Seeing no opposition, no end.  Free of lust and greed.  Without burden and without our brother but moving towards him.  Moving towards our brother, our sister.  Hear them call from out in the wild.  We’ll hear them clearest in our dreams.

Our engagement with desire snaps, we’re sent out into the wide arms of the world.  The barriers come down.  Lies so long and hard they calcified tendons on the tree of life they choked the sun and made a scythe of the moon.  Our suffering was everywhere but apathy has not kept us protected.  Seeing clear-eyed finally, rising up and out, bearing witness and pulled into and through our one true love.  We celebrate presence now by being present.  We don’t have to heal the world. Evil has been through us and it’s fine.  It wracked us and made a yolk of survival.  But here and now we know.  Here is prayer.  The moment, sweet moment, keeps arriving and departing.  Just as we breathe, in and then out.  And all else falls and will fall and rise again but we are prostrate we are still.   Praise we can delight in the storms.  As witness. Breathing, tending these wild poems of the wind.

Further,
Jim Trainer
Austin, TX