No sooner do I curtail my blogging time, in order to more fully pursue the sacred path of my art, than I find this blog has made the Big Time (whatever that is. It sure doesn't seem to involve much new traffic to this site), given a link in the August 29, Dallas Morning News, religion feature Blogging for GOD - Web sites serve as spiritual diaries, chronicling opinions and musings on faith (The Dallas Morning News requires free registration for access to this story).

This blog is one of 12 or so Buddhist blogs listed under the heading Sacred Cyberspace. I am honored to be included in this group, of course, but I couldn't have done it without Buddha or Blogger.

An Inspiration, a Declaration and about 500 Words Between

I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filld with books & pictures of old which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & whose works are the delight & Study of Archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality. The Lord our father will do for us & with us according to his Divine will for our Good.

- William Blake, excerpted from a letter to John Flaxman, 9/21/1800 -

William Blake is a constant inspiration to me. The lines above, for instance, have remained with me a month or more after reading them. What a vision this man possessed, or was possessed by. If only I could share a meager ounce of that Sight. Thank God for people like Blake, to illumine the way for those of us who don't shine quite as bright.

We strive to shine, none the less.

I wish that I shared Blake's faith in a "Divine will for our Good". I feel that I should. I have that instinct, that hunger for God deep in the center of me. I know that there is something greater than my tiny self but I'm not convinced it gives a goodgoddamn about me. Sarah tells me that I am The Beloved of The Universe and I know in that same deep place that she is right. But where is my Faith in that Love?

I'm just dubious by nature, I suppose.

Something is moving in me, though. Divine Will or my own? It has fomented a decision which has been a long time brewing. Surely, I have lined this very space previously with words regarding my struggles in the trenches of the blogging vs. "Real" writing debate. Surely it was a debate still carried on within my heart and skull if not on this blog.

You see, I can't help comparing what I do with this blog and what I could, should be doing in a notebook, a word document. Blogging vs. writing. It is, of course, a ridiculous proposition. This blog offers definite creative rewards and might just give to the world more than I can know. How can I measure the value of blogging?

But even as I type these words in favor of blogging I feel that they are a defensive fence -I feel compelled to set it up because I believe in it, but it will snap and break under greater truths.

The writing of poetry and stories is of greater worth to me than the maintenance of this blog. But the on-line reading and writing known as blogging is occupying 89% (according to recent studies) of my creative time.

There are stories untold languishing behind my eyes. Poor Jarny has been left hanging between life and death in an elevator for more months than I can remember. Ideas for short stories blossom and wilt from lack of nurturing in my brain. The narrative that was born in this space as two initially separate vignettes is beginning to clamor for my attention.

It is, as I say, an attention divided. It is battle enough for me to indulge The Muse against the well of idleness that sucks at my aspirations and ambitions. This blog, the reading and writing of blogs, is a distraction I am beginning to see I can do without. I must write down, or at least try to, those stories in my head.

It is maddening, in its way, to glimpse them there, waiting to receive my gaze, to show me places and faces I will never know if I don't look soon. It is a gift, I know, the ability to see through to that place where dreams and stories come from. It is not a gift I wish to squander.

Unlike Blake above, I am unsure of the status of my immortal works in Heaven. I can't say if the Angels are shaking their heads in wonder or disgust. So I gotta' keep trying. Toward that end I make the following personal and public declaration:

After not unlengthy consideration, I state that hereby and henceforth this blog will relieve itself of its weight, both social and creative, upon me. Blogging in general will take a secondary place in whatever passes for my scheme of things. I will update this space on a regular if not frequent basis - say once a week or so. Blog reading, or rolling as I suppose it's called, will not cease but may become erratic. I am refocusing energy. I am painting stripes on tigers. I am pinning dragons to the edges of maps. I am, in the words of Shriekback, "Hauling the Kraken up with blocks and chains".

Wish me luck, folks.

And remember. . . I'm still here. The notes are just being dispatched a little less frequently. I'm going inside to play.

12 years ago today Sarah and myself were legally wed. Time does, indeed, fly when one is having fun!

Follow this link for details about the wedding and why we do not consider it our primary anniversary.

The poem below has been rejected by five different publishers in the last 3 years.

What's the matter with them? Don't they know I was once called a genius?


Haunted

Dead men linger �round your window
most nights
as you lie in bed, sleeping.

Unaware of the dead,
you divide the dark between dreams and oblivion.
You never hear them creeping.

Once, flickering into consciousness,
you mistook a pale face for the moon.

When morning comes they wander
into bar rooms, alleys,
the bushes beside the freeway.

They mingle and hide as best they can,
haunted by your sleeping face
all through the burning day.

No, I suppose they don't. I can't even recall the name of the teacher who so honored me.

Nor do I recall being published in the July/August issue of Starquest.

I have no record of ever (as in never) submitting any material to this publication.

But the folks at Locusmag.com seem to believe that my old poem, The Ballad of Young Jack Shaugnessy , saw print in the pages of a magazine called Starquest back in '94.

Hmmmmm. . .

Time to don the old detective hat.

Color me disappointed. Very. I learned yesterday that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama will be kicking off a tour of the US in San Francisco on September 5, at which time he will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of San Francisco and give a public lecture in Buddhist philosophy and universal responsibility at Davies Symphony Hall.

I am not disappointed that His Holiness is visiting the city in which I work, of course, but by the fact that I didn't learn of his visit sooner. The lecture is completely sold out. Ugh. What really gets me is that I knew he was coming to the US as early as two weeks ago but, relying on information at His Holiness' own (woefully in need of an update) website, I thought that his trip would be limited to New York and therefore far beyond my budgets of time and money.

Ugh, I say again. Are there, I wonder, scalpers who hawk tickets to spiritual events and, if so, would it be against the principle of right action to patronize them?

I had almost forgotten about my Notes From a Life in Progress trivia give away (or whatever I called it) when Brendan and his Leptard, blogging to us from scenic and no doubt mythic Galway in the west of Ireland, sent an e-mail my way that was absolutely chock full of correct responses to the trivia questions I posed. Brendan, as I understand, actually took the time to poke through my archives to arrive at the following facts:

Sarah and myself met in 1989 through the medium of voicemail. No, not some kind of telephone dating service but a strangely creative/social bubble that grew around this technology.

Brendan was fortunate to get his research done when he did. As I write this my archives have once again joind the legendary legions of vanishing Blogger archives. I plan to attempt a republish when I am done here if anybody else wishes to have a go at the remaining question set and magazine:

I have discovered two male poets/writers in the past year or so and have subsequently blogged about them and their respective works. What are their names?

Congratulations, Brendan, and thanks once again for joining in the fun here. Soon, for your efforts and bravado in braving my archives, you will be luxuriating in the splendor and ease of Deep Tapioca issue 4, Vol. I, 2003, a masterwork of poetry by yours truly improving by virtue of its rich insight and very presence the space of page ten (10).

As I have mentioned previously in this space, I am given to certain language eccentricities which compel me to utter nonsense words and phrases or to join actual words in unlikely or rhyming combinations. I mention this only to give some context to the previous post (8/6/03), immediately below.

Moolish Hoots, contours and Shiggy the Blip are just the kinds of things you would be likely to hear if you lived with me. Lucky you.

Actually, I no longer give voice to that last turn, Shiggy the Blip. Sarah asked me quite some time ago to cease my mutterings of those three words. They jangled her nerves. As I wish to be more a balm than a bomb to my Sarah I have been true to her request and refrained from speaking Shiggy the Blip in her presence. The words have hardly left my mind, though, in many months even for lack of utterance.

Sarah believes that these Tourettic traits might inform or even underlie my experiments with poetry.

Could be and probably, in fact, is. But where is the poetry in Moolish Hoots. . . Shiggy the Blip?

moolish hoots

contours

Shiggy the Blip

The Reasons Why

by

Richard Cody

For

Sarah Cody

2

I love you because
You cook our meals in the same way
That Millay crafted meter and rhyme.

You are a poet of the gas range,
Composing sonnets in crushed red pepper,
Butter, garlic and thyme.

Elaine made the Chicago Tribune a day or two back. I suppose this is old news in cyber time but this is Notes from a Life in Progress not News From a Life in Progress. Sporadic, erratic dispatches from the far fields and, sometimes, uncomfortably close places my mind and heart wander as this entity known as ME makes his way from day to day.

Current events too, sure, from time to time. Love poems. . .

But I digress. Elaine , as I say, was featured in a Chicago Tribune article about female bloggers (free registration required for the article!).

I was honered that Elaine named me in the same breath, or Times New Roman font, as Tom Shugart and Mike Golby as one of her favorite male bloggers. Don't look for our names in the article. We didn't make the final cut.

As for female bloggers? Personally, I look forward to the day we have human bloggers, undivided.

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, "These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom."
They said to him, "Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?"
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom."

- The Gospel of Thomas, verse 22 -

In the mean time I say speak up sisters and, in so doing, help us to enter the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.