Every Frog Has its Day

O, tree frog, thou who leaps from branch to branch,
Driven by the unrelenting will to act,
A slave to thy instincts, yet in thy hunger,
A power untamed, a force of nature's harsh,
Yet beautiful, law. Thy eyes, sharp and keen,
Catch the beetle, not for nourishment alone,
But for the affirmation of thy own becoming.
In that lunge, in that moment, thou art not
A mere creature, but the very will to life,
Grasping, devouring, asserting thy place in the eternal cycle.
The harmony of nature? A construct for the weak,
For those who cannot grasp the truth -  
That only through the act of taking,
The world is made real, and meaning arises.
Thus, in thy hunger, thou art both predator and prey,
And in thy struggle, life is justified.

Incident at Ephesus

Apollonius stood where the paving stones met their own long memory, a pale geometry warmed by noon and by feet that had worn them smooth across centuries of errands, quarrels, flirtations, vows. The agora breathed – olive oil and dust, figs split open in wicker trays, a faint metallic tang drifting from the harbor. Columns lifted their fluted throats toward a sky rinsed clean, the blue held there as if by a promise spoken long ago and kept through habit. Faces gathered as weather gathers: sailors with salt sewn into their beards, merchants bright-eyed with accounts, old women whose shawls carried the hush of evenings, boys who learned the city by learning how to look.

His voice entered the space and found purchase. It did not hurry. It spread. A sound with edges softened by patience, the kind that settles into the body and hums there, sympathetic, as a string discovers its neighbor. He spoke as one who had been listening all morning to something larger than the crowd, something that moved beyond the harbor masts and the western hills where light thins and thickens by turns. Words arrived and lingered. They bore weight without heaviness, sweetness without sugar. A phrase curved and the pigeons startled; a pause opened and the wind stepped through.

“Take heart,” he said, and the syllables found their way into wrists and knees, into the hidden hinge of the jaw. He looked westward – toward the sun’s later work, toward roads and rumors, toward the long arm of the sea that carries messages as easily as it carries storms. The gaze itself became a bridge. A murmur began, not speech yet, more a tuning. Sandals shifted. Someone laughed once, too early, then covered it with a cough. A woman closed her eyes and saw a different morning.

He spoke of an end, and the word fell like a leaf that knows its hour. The tyrant – name shaped by breath and then released – had met his day. No thunder answered, yet the air took on a keen clarity, as if every object had been washed. The plane trees stood straighter. The marble seemed to remember its quarry. A dog trotted across the square with a bone and looked up, puzzled by the sudden quiet. The city, alert as a listening animal, leaned in.

Skepticism did its small work and then stepped aside. It had the look of a habit shrugged off. People weighed the sentence in their palms, turned it, felt its balance. Somewhere a child repeated a word and found it tasted good. The news moved without legs. It passed through skin. It crossed the space between two men who had not spoken since a lawsuit years before. It brushed the cheek of a woman whose husband kept accounts for Rome and left a brightness there. The agora learned a new temperature.

Apollonius remained where he was, the body a quiet center. His voice kept its course, neither climbing nor sinking, and the west kept its light, a band of gold like a held breath. The crowd sensed a hinge turning. The city’s old stones felt it too; they had learned to listen for changes that arrive before proof. A prophecy need not shout when it carries the grain of the world. It can whisper and still be heard.

Joy entered sideways. It did not shout its name. It took the shape of gestures: a hand finding another hand, a nod exchanged across the open space, a merchant letting the scales rest. Someone began a song and stopped, smiling, saving it. The thought of a future loosened its shoulders and sat down among them. The word today grew wide enough to hold more than itself.

Light moved across the square, a small republic of shadows rearranging their borders. Apollonius watched the west a moment longer. In his stillness there was motion, the kind that belongs to tides and thoughts. When he turned back, the faces met him as mirrors meet light, each taking and giving. No banner unfurled. No decree was read. The city absorbed the utterance the way soil takes rain, darkening, ready.

False Start

The ritual turned upon itself the way weather turns, with no announcement beyond a pressure felt in the teeth. What had been a slow choreography of light – eddies of pale force looping like silk caught in a courteous breeze – thickened and darkened, acquiring weight, a gravity of posture. The air learned new grammar. Sound gathered before sound existed, a held breath that made the leaves stiffen as if listening with their veins. At the edge of hearing, far fields answered: birds lifted as one, a startled fugue tearing free of the hedgerows, the sky suddenly busy with punctuation.

From the center, the shape emerged without crossing distance. It was less an arrival than a correction, shadow coaxed into volume. The darkness wore a contour that suggested appetite, a velvet geometry whose angles were soft enough to deceive the eye into kindness. It leaned forward. The grove tilted with it. Shadows braided and unbraided, a patient ropework performed by the trunks, and the ground grew articulate – pebbles clicking their small consonants, soil exhaling a loam-sweet vowel.

The caster stood within the circle as one stands within a thought. Skin shone with sweat and ash; breath traced white calligraphy in the chill that had crept in like a civil servant. When the scream came it carried distance inside it, a long corridor of sound flung outward, so that even the remote nests trembled, even the far grass bent its head. The beast lunged, yes, but the word lunge feels athletic; this was a folding, a sudden hospitality of darkness, an embrace whose arms were made of all the angles the light had forgotten. The body disappeared as sugar disappears into tea – no drama, a sweetness solved.

After, the grove settled into itself with the composure of old furniture. Soot freckled the bark. Leaves bore a faint gloss, as if polished by a hand that had read too much. The air held a warmth that felt earned. Silence arrived without ceremony and stayed, a guest who knows where to put the hat. The trees conveyed what trees convey when they have seen centuries blink by: a warning, perhaps, but also a lesson in scale, a reminder that forces larger than names conduct themselves with a peculiar courtesy. Even devastation kept its manners.

Light resumed its ordinary labor, finding paths through branches, inventing green again. The circle on the ground retained a memory, a scar that felt less like damage than script – an anagram the soil would spend seasons rearranging. In the hush, one could sense a generosity at work, a world capable of swallowing terror and transmuting it into texture. The grove did not speak. It stood. And in standing, it offered the only counsel it ever gives: attend, attend – here, where even shadows have a pulse, and pulse implies life, and life, despite everything, keeps saying yes.

Words for Life

Choose vivid words to convey emotion. 

Foster connection between disparate images. 

Let each sentence inherit momentum from the one preceding it. 

Permit moments of compression alongside expansive meditation. 

Describe subjects affirmatively through their presence, activity, substance, and embodiment.

Balance abstraction with sensuous particularity. 

Avoid habitual similes.

Find beauty in brevity.

Act Magic

To live like a magician, suspend all judgment. Cut the cords of linear thought that bind to the mundane. Respond with the subconscious, where creativity thrives beyond the confines of routine thinking.

Delve into the subconscious intentionally. Through mindfulness or cryptic dreams, uncover latent truths. Let the subconscious paint its revelations on the canvas of daily life, guiding authentic self-discovery.

Symbols and synchronicity are the language. Decode the mundane into the symbolic. Live in synchronicity, interpreting meaningful coincidences as guideposts on the path of personal evolution.

Craft personal narratives deliberately. Become the author of your own saga, infusing each chapter with purpose. Life, then, becomes a tapestry woven from the strands of experience.

Live with perpetual wonder. See the world as an enchanting spectacle, a stage for the alchemy of existence. Transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, embracing the marvelous in the everyday.

Mysticism is an invitation – a call to transcend the known, to venture into the uncharted territories of self and cosmos. It's an exploration not just of living but of becoming.

Eleusis

When moonlight dripped from heaven's dome
Like argent wine from chalice old,
Along the sacred road to home
The silent bands of seekers rolled;
Through olive groves and cypress shade,
Where ancient winds in whispers sighed,
They followed where the darkness strayed
And where forbidden wonders hide.

The stars above, those silver seeds,
Were scattered through night's velvet sea,
While murmurous winds among the reeds
Sang hymns of lost antiquity;
The earth exhaled a mystic breath,
Perfumed with myrrh and autumn rain,
As though the realms of sleep and death
Had drifted near the world again.

Then rose the torches, one by one,
Like blossoms forged of living gold,
Their flames eclipsing moon and sun
With tales no mortal tongue had told;
They cast upon the marble walls
Strange sigils wrought by vanished years,
And filled the vast initiates' halls
With splendor born of hopes and fears.

There wandered Demeter in grief,
Through spectral fields of asphodel,
Seeking beyond the harvest sheaf
The daughter lost to shadows fell;
Her footsteps stirred the sleeping grain,
Her tears became the evening dew,
And all the sorrows born of pain
Awoke beneath night's sable hue.

Far down where silent rivers gleam
Beneath the roots of earth and stone,
Persephone moved like a dream
Across a dim and starless throne;
Around her bloomed the pallid rose,
The narcissus of forgotten springs,
While through the dark eternal flows
The music sorrow softly sings.

The hierophant with veiled eyes stood,
A keeper of the hidden flame,
Whose lineage stretched through time's dark wood
Before the birth of crown or name;
His silence seemed a sacred chord
That trembled through the vaulted air,
For deeper than the spoken word
Are truths that dwell in secret prayer.

And there the initiates drew near
The threshold none could fully tell,
Where wonder mingled with its fear
As heaven brushed the skirts of hell;
The torchlight danced, the shadows swayed,
The darkness breathed with subtle life,
And every certainty decayed
Within that sanctified midwife.

What vision flashed before their gaze?
What revelation crowned the rite?
Did unseen suns ignite the haze
And pour their rivers through the night?
Did death unveil its hidden face?
Did time release its iron hold?
The centuries have left no trace,
And silence guards the tale untold.

Yet something passed from soul to soul,
A spark no darkness could erase,
A fragment of a vaster whole,
A memory of another place;
For those who crossed the mystic sea
Returned with altered hearts and eyes,
As though they glimpsed eternity
Concealed beneath familiar skies.

The olive branch, the falling grain,
The moon that silvered hill and stream,
The cycle born of loss and gain,
All shimmered with a deeper gleam;
Each shadow held a secret door,
Each dawn contained the ghost of night,
And every ending sheltered more
Than mortal wisdom could recite.

O Eleusis! Moon-haunted shrine,
Where silence flowered into song,
Where mortal roots and stars entwine
And hidden truths to souls belong;
Still through the corridors of years
Your sacred echoes drift and flow,
A melody of hopes and fears
That only midnight hearts can know.

For when the autumn moon ascends
Above the hills in spectral grace,
And darkness with the starlight blends
Across the world's remembering face,
The ancient torches seem to burn,
The sacred voices seem to rise,
And Persephone appears to turn
Her dream-lit gaze toward earthly skies.

Then once again the mystery wakes,
Its silver petals opening wide,
As moonlight on the marble breaks
Like tides upon a haunted tide;
And seekers hear, though none can say
What truth the whispered currents bear -
Only that night remembers day,
And something waits forever there.

The Visit

I went walking.
They told me fresh air would help.

The trail had no name.
I don’t remember how I found it.

The trees were still  –
not with peace,
but with the effort of holding something in.

The sky above me was the wrong shape.
And the wind,
when it came,
sounded like breathing practiced too long.

It was beautiful.
In the same way an open casket is beautiful.

I stopped at a clearing.
The grass there was too green  –
obscene,
as if it had never died,
not even once.

Something about the pattern of the leaves
made my thoughts slow down.
Not empty.
Just… incorrect.

There was no sound.
Not even the silence birds make
before a storm.

I understood then:
the forest does not love you.
It does not welcome.
It receives.

I left.
Or I believe I did.

The trees here look
familiar now.
But they lean in
a little closer each morning.