A Driver, My Soul and a Car - Parable

A Driver, My Soul and a Car

This is the body I have. This body, this vehicle which looks to me like a cherry ’65 Buick Riviera convertible, comes equipped in this place with a driver. The driver is an odd character with many heads, endless opinions and “endless –squared” stories. He does not consistently display any one trait; not kindness, mean-spiritedness, sweetness, wisdom or foolishness. The many-headed driver is merely insane. Not in an overt manner, but insane nonetheless. He can display any trait at any given moment and then change to its opposite in the blink of an eye if another head has the desire to be heard.

My soul inhabits the same vehicle. It is soft, white, radiant, full of childlike joy and sage-like wisdom. It is an explorer above all else, seeking experience for the experience sake - and it has had a lot of it. It happily agreed to climb into this car with the lunatic. My soul, apparently, knows no fear. It understands that in the end, the lunatic in the drivers’ seat is unable to hurt it. And to be sure, the driver is entertaining as hell , even charming usually, a non-stop talker. My soul listens with an amused half-smile as the heads all take their turns telling noisy stories above the rushing wind of the convertible about the scenery outside, about their lives, opinions, fantasies and especially complaints.

My soul often thinks to itself, “What an interesting character, this driver. He knows relatively little, but speaks incessantly. However,” my soul smiles, “sometimes we agree. And I would never have seen so much lonely highway, so many thunder and lightning storms, great canyons, vast oceans and white-tipped mountains without him. Or... them.” And then he chuckles.

Days, months and years speed by with my soul as the passenger. On angry days the many-headed
driver challenges my soul to a dual of sorts. He’ll very surreptitiously reach his left hand into the drivers’ side door pocket and bring out a bottle. He sneaks a sip, then two. My soul will often pretend he doesn’t see the driver sipping an intoxicant as they wildly barrel down the lonely desert highway. But he does see it. In the early days of the journey the driver could actually fool my soul. But my soul now knows him so well that very little the driver does can get past him.

What’s in the bottle, you ask? It can be any number of things. Sugar, overeating and sex are among the drivers’ favorites, although rage and music have had their days. Sometimes what the driver drinks is wholesome enough. But in the quantities he wants to consume, they become intoxicating.

When the intoxication starts, the lunatic may stop on his own. If it surfaces through the haze, his concern is not for his passenger, but for himself. After all, he can be injured or killed. He is not immortal, as my soul is. But at other times he turns to my soul and, slurring his words in an obnoxious challenge, he tells my soul that they are unloved and alone in an impossible land. He says the world is a scary, dangerous place. And then he’ll tell how he came to those conclusions from the vast experience of his many heads. Oh, the stories he tells as long as my soul is there to listen!

At some point my soul has a decision to make; one of three choices. He can allow the lunatic to continue to drive, either listening intently to his dark pontifications, or try to ignore him as he gets louder and louder, or he can move into the drivers’ seat. It is entirely within his power to do so. He just melts over and gently displaces the sullen, frightened, intoxicated driver. He takes the wheel, decreases the speed of the car and turns off the radio while the angry, smelly tour guide sleeps his fear off in the passenger seat. This has been happening for many, many years.

Over the years, however, a subtle change has taken place in the driver. There are fewer heads. My soul was surprised to see this phenomenon when it first occurred, but one morning there were simply fewer. Speeding down the highway in the morning cactus bloom, my soul was hesitant to ask, but it
said, “Mr. Driver,” he’s so respectful, my soul, “there seem to be fewer of you this morning.”

The driver just nodded so my soul continued. “As you so often put it…what gives?”  

My soul watched the driver shrink a little in his seat, and a couple heads briefly reappeared, seemingly with more stories to tell, and then inexplicably sunk away again. Shrugging, he said, “I guess I just don’t have that much to say right now.”

And then…silence. More than silence, it was stillness. The wind rushing by seemed to sing the songs of springtime swallows and the desert blooms cheered their fragrant souls into the open air under a sky so fair and grand and blue that it defies appropriate description. My soul smiled. The driver too allowed a smile – an amused half smile – to come across his lips. And to his surprise, there was only one pair of them.

With a sense and expression of peace that he had borrowed, however briefly, from his passenger, the driver turned to my soul and asked for the first time, “So, tell me about you.”   

This was the beginning of all growth.

--Eric Marley

April 2015   

Chunks - rant

Chunks

Go to the Source. Quit drinking the backwash of the saints that you were told had the answers. They had some of the answers for themselves, but it was never their job to have them for you. And like you, at times they didn't even have answers for themselves, or know how to ask the right questions. Bottom line: don't trust your everlasting soul to someone else. Go talk to God yourself. Get out of your temporary head and body and go stand on a ladder that gives you a view worthy of the sacred You. Fast for a week. Eat drugs respectfully. Don't talk for ten days. Take part in hard core spiritual ceremonies in traditions that respect your sovereign right to make an unholy mess of, or holy edifice to, what you love. You do not need any intercessor, prophet or savior. You were not built to need. YOU ARE A CHUNK OF GOD. Why would you need another chunk to tell you what to do next, or How It Is, or pay for your so-called sins? Get curious! Ask questions of EVERYTHING. Love EVERYONE. Realize you do NOT walk in their temporary skins. If they look crazy to you, that's because they're not you! Learn to be ok with that. Protect yourself if you must, but wrap yourself carefully with shining love and not oppressive fear. If in your exploration you find a person that seems to have walked where you want to walk, ask them stuff. Get to know them. You will find that they know a few things, but not all things. You will find that where they align with you, you can see all the way to God. Where they don't, they're crazy as a loon. Take the stuff that is useful to you, then take it to the Source and see how you can use it. Then use more fasting, silence, stillness, solitude, piercing, drugs, whatever. Does it really matter what it costs? Get going.... You have a lot of play to do! And you are freaking awesome!

--Eric Marley
February 2015

Sow What (It Will Be)? - Prose

Sow What (It Will Be)?

A little prose

To break your knows

A freethinking fist in your faith

The Jesus you teach

Has gone to the beach

And left you to deal with your wraiths

He left you instruction

A lifelong injunction

To leave all your bombs at the gate

To enter in peace

And drop to your knees

Releasing your fears and your hate

But it makes you uneasy

Them Muslims is sleazy

Mohammed you’re called to abate

So you smuggle bombs in

Through the gate – it’s no sin

To defend your most holy of states

But that’s not what He taught

Your religion is fraught

With the blood that is always the fate

Of those who adorn

The truth with the thorns

Of their fears that are harder than slate

Sow what (it will be)?

Will you follow our Jesus

On soft summer breezes

That blow through the souls of the Few

Who play in the sun
In the light of the One
Refracting His light like the dew?

Or... will you bow to your fear

O religious bombardier
Heart drier than September fescue?

Your eyes wet with tears
Dark soul in arrears
Play acting an unholy rescue?
 

--Eric Marley
April 2015

Good Noodles - Essay

In The Matrix there is a scene where Neo, now fully integrated in the new reality of the red pill, is on a mission with other Nebuchadnezzar crew members in the old reality called the matrix. Neo knows that what he has experienced since his awakening is a far greater and more powerful reality than the one from which he was recently liberated, which was nothing more than a dangerous illusion. Still, old ways of thinking die hard. In one scene, as he is riding with Trinity in the back of a very hip Lincoln Continental down a street once familiar to him in the matrix, they pass a restaurant.

“I used to eat there,” he says to Trinity, a twinge of excitement in his tone. She stares back as if to ask what he could possibly have been eating, knowing what he knows from this new vantage. Getting the point from her stare alone, that food in the matrix could not have been food at all, he quietly mumbles to himself, “Good noodles.” 

Sometimes we who begin to see a different reality than the one long familiar, leap from our cages with great ferocity. This is as it should be. One cannot fault any being for unwillingness to stay in an environment that suddenly reveals itself to be something other than advertised. However, we often find ourselves  in a new reality without a familiar foundation under us. Difficulty can arise because we are creatures of habit. It’s how we’re wired. In many ways, habits sustain us as they have for tens of thousands of years. Ancient ancestors walked certain paths through jungles and plains because they were deemed safe enough. But we have all had habits that were not safe. While inhabiting and negotiating new realities, we are sometimes wont to return to old ways simply for the benefit of experiencing something familiar. So we are tempted to go back to the belief system that no longer feeds us, or the substandard career, or the dangerous relationship.

Good noodles.

In the end, it pays to remember that we are in a different reality than that which we once knew. The things that once fed us are no longer valid food. When those old, comforting habits or beliefs arise that destroy our energy, our sense of oneness with All, our peace, our innate sense of our soulful beauty, it makes sense to smile at the illusion that we once trusted and note the soft distance between it and our new reality, and all the reasons we once left it. We might even note the wounds that once drew the illusions toward us in the first place and choose to see the healing, yet incomplete, that is taking place within us. New friends and soulful habits, and an appreciation for the process of becoming - with its myriad, rainbow emotions and experiences - can all assist us when delicious old restaurants reappear outside our window.

In the end, what serves us best is to cruise on by, a slight smile on our lips.

Sunlit Sill - POEM

Sunlit Sill

Burrowing

Cuddling and

Curling up on my soul’s sunlit sill…

I wasn’t looking for you

But there you were

Blinking sleepily from inside my smile

And now you live here.

Your fur tickles me from behind my bones

And you know it does

And you know I can’t help but feed you

And bid you to continue

Burrowing

Cuddling and

Curling up on my soul’s sunlit sill.

An easy chair is nearby

So

Seeing you

I stopped what I was doing -

(I can’t remember it being as important

As a pause

In this moment)

So now I sit blessed by the sun

Warm and precious

And close my eyes

I wouldn’t have paused if you hadn’t come here

I wouldn’t have seen this sun

This corner of my home

So I burrow

Cuddle and

Curl up next to you

And we open our sleepy eyes

And lock souls

And smile ourselves home.  

--Eric Marley

Road Trip - Poem

Road Trip

Godlike, I see myself driving

Ragtop down

Fixed up Cutlass

Pulsing desert

Heat blown frantic

Hard wind pushing

Destination

Spinning mind

Spinning wheels

Wheels make noise

Noise in mind

Mind spinning

Spinning wheels

Circles and

More circles

Rockstars make his bladder cry

So I see my road tripping self

Pull off to the side of the road

Taking a leak into the thirsty air

The vision of the non-blurred world shocks him.

A zephyr blows through his road dirt hair

As he realizes he never slows down.

And now he beats himself up for it

He senses with something akin to terror

That he has never slowed

And he has never seen.

Eyes wide, his life flashes before them

And all he sees is waste.

All he sees is blur.  

Stop it.

Stop it!

Stop making goals that are unreachable from your place.

Take smaller steps.

Or don’t take any today.
See now.

Sacred Now.

See where you are

Without looking back.

Without looking forward.
Love this place without looking for another.

Leave the keys in the ignition.

You can leave any time.

You’ve come so far
But your odometer

Doesn’t have the language

To describe the miles, or your starting place, or the distance you can go.

See only now.

You’ve pulled off to the side of the road.

In the desert as far as the eye can see.

A coyote trots unhurried.

A jackrabbit stares.

A holy spider knits knots.

And the sky…

The sky as deep true and inclusive as love itself is above you

Now.

So stop striving

Your cosmic driving

Is making me tired

The wheel is dirty under your hands

It’s ok.

Your wind whipped tears have made streaks on your face.

A face that is always before me

A face that has been loved longer than you have the capacity to remember

I love this face

See what I do, road tripper:

I am not setting a goal

I am not working out

I am not taking a jog

I am not apologizing for shit

I am not regretting anything

I am not hoping for later

I am not planning my next move

I am not fantasizing about sailing

I am not wondering what she meant when she said that

I am not thinking about my incredible life in retrospect

I am not going to save someone, as if I could

I am not going to shake my head at my stupidity

Today, I am going to putter like the bored Deity I am

I am going to daydream like the way a stray dog wanders

Aimlessly

I am going to saunter at the Walden of my world

I am going to nap

I am going to create

And you, road tripper are free to do the same.

Please

Do the same.

We are the same.

--Eric Marley

November 2014

 

Reunited - Poem

Reunited

And I sat next to you

In the east side

Of a deep sweat lodge

At the sacred juncture
Where masculine and feminine meet

Reaching for your hand in the velvet darkness

I found the paw

Of a lioness

And in the forest I floated

Dust in streaming sunbeam

Alighting on you

A regal cedar

I hugged you

And bark became flesh

Became woman

Your essence human embodied

And in the ocean we met

Two drops became one

Laughing through a fish’s gills

Warming submerged volcanic glow

Broken apart by breaking wave

And then

Each time
Reunited again

Finally…

--Eric for Heather

October 2014