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. The city’s many languages answered one another with jokes and puns – liber tasting of book and freedom both; finis playing its double tune; a Greek pun slipped into Latin and came out laughing. Solecisms bloomed like poppies. Someone misused a verb and was applauded for it. The sentence of the hour allowed such liberties.

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.

Ephesus, with its streets that curve like sentences, held the moment and let it echo inward. The promise lay there among the stalls and columns, among the breath and the bread, durable as stone yet alive as skin. A day had learned a new name. And the agora, having listened, went on listening, attentive to the ordinary miracles that follow a word spoken at the right hour.

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 a 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. Find beauty in brevity.

 

 Act Magic

***

To live like a magician, suspend 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

In stygian Eleusis, moon's pale glow withers, 

Murmurs coil boughs, secret vows whispered. 

Initiates light eldritch fires, piercing cosmic abyss, 

Persephone's wail echoes, haunting ethereal hiss.

 

Torches illuminate nightmarish path, sanity unraveled, 

Symbols woven into the rite, madness traveled. 

Through accursed hallways, Demeter's cosmic chase, 

Sacrament profane, unveiling darkened embrace.

 

Hierophant's threshold, keeper of lore's blackened core, 

Mysteries unfold, revelation through abyss explored.

No words, only echoes of chants, hanging in accursed air, 

Eleusis, harbinger of enigmas, where horrors declare.

 

O Eleusis, shadows and dread moonlit dance,

Seeker merge, soul ascends, remnants enhance.

A vessel for revelations, ineffable concealed, 

Whispers hush, lights flash, mysteries are revealed.

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.

Haiku for Inner Self

Mystic symbols bloom, 

Essence unveils Rosicrucian lore, 

Alchemy to wisdom!

Song for February

In union, bodies braid like molten dusk, time dissolves in trembling, liquid loops. Each thrust, a cascade of incandescent flesh, melts the lattice of desire into luminous streams. On Turnus’ bloodstained stage, destiny convulses, the spear arcs - a comet tearing fate’s brittle cloak. Its weight is a litany of echoes, ancient Rome thrums in its relentless recoil. Upon the cross, the still figure sways, silence sharp as obsidian, piercing the marrow. The spear bites paradox - a wound that sings, revealing visions only fire and shadow can contain. Through the corridors of history, the acts resound, thrust, pierce, penetrate - each echo a prism, each prism a doorway into fervent wonder.