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Moor on Manhattan

PhoenixMoor Flyer

And that’s all there really is to say…  The New York City debut of this play begins on April 21st.  The Wild Project is an intimate 88 seat black box playing space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  It is the perfect space to perform this piece in, and I expect it to be oversold for all of it’s eleven dates.

The members of Phoenix Theatre Ensemble and I are all hugely excited about this endeavor.  Our collaboration in presenting this work is the next logical step in the performance path of something that I’ve begun to believe has true contemporary relevance and import.

As per usual, I urge everyone to secure a seat soon, and to come be a part of this continuing discussion.

For those who’ve come late to the party, just to bring you up to speed…

American Moor is a passionate and uneasy study of a large African American actor auditioning for the role of Othello for a middle-aged white director who portends to have knowledge about how a large black man should act and respond in an unaccepting society.

The play asks uncomfortable and complex questions, moving to much larger issues than the audition/theatre process: Is there a patronizing racism that exists in our contemporary theatre?  Is this a microcosm of progressive/liberal society that thinks it has knowledge of the black experience?  Do directors want to work with actors who ask challenging questions in a 3-week rehearsal process?

And then, there is the whole issue of whether or not we can ever talk past our own personal perspective to address any of these questions and a multitude of others…

It’s a big chunk of theatre that will make you laugh… or maybe weep…

“In this remarkable evening a unique performer with an uncanny ear for the language of Shakespeare lures you into taking a startling double journey.

In the seeming act of demolishing The Bard’s OTHELLO and resurrecting him in his own image, Keith Hamilton Cobb takes you on a riveting journey through the love and rage in the turbulent interior of a modern black man.” 

                                                Ellen Holly, Actress/Writer, author of ONE LIFE:                                                                         The Autobiography of an African American Actress.



Powerful Return Performance Weekend at Luna Stage

I’ve always got to start with thanks…

It was not the easiest weekend to come out to the theatre.  There was snow… lots of it…  But many made it to Luna Stage just the same, and stayed to share their thoughts and perceptions at the latest incarnation of this work, “American Moor.”

LunaMoor-Opening-31web

Opening tableau, “American Moor” at Luna Stage 2/27/15

Added to the weekend’s many adventures was the presence of film maker, Bobby Razak, and his crew, accruing footage for some cinematic rendering of the play, and a study of the myriad elements that have conspired to give birth to and grow it.

Bobby Razak and I, November 2009

Film maker, Bobby Razak and I, November 2009

Bobby’s film making career has spanned twenty years, focusing mostly on the world of mixed martial arts.  But he is also taken with theatre, and this project presents a huge departure for him in his work, and an exploration of an actor’s life as opposed to that of a fighter’s…  There are many similarities as we have discovered…

Filming post-performance, day 3 of the Luna Weekend.  Final thoughts and perceptions for camera...

Filming post-performance, day 3 of the Luna Weekend. Final thoughts and perceptions for camera…

LunaMoor-Talkback-31bweb

“American Moor” performance Q&A at Luna Stage 3/1/15

Two of the three performances over the course of the weekend were extremely strong from a critical standpoint.  One was not.  We had issues that effected all of us, camera crew, theatre staff, and performer on Saturday night that made it difficult to muscle through to the curtain call.  But the audience response that evening was equally as positive and complimentary as it had been on either of the other two nights.  I am beginning to believe that the content of the script is tending to outweigh what might from time to time be lacking in performance.  This is a wonderful reassurance.  Not that I plan to get lazy and let the power of the words carry the show forward.  We’ve still got a long way to go…  But I was encouraged by the weekend with all its ups and downs.  Those that came out made everything work, and contributed to the further education of everyone involved.

"American Moor" post-show audience interaction 2/28/15.

“American Moor” post-show audience interaction 2/28/15.

“American Moor” is such a minimalist and simple show to stage.  It is essentially a single man on a bare stage for 87 minutes…  And so it is continually fascinating to me how layered and complex the matter of the play becomes, particularly when discussions about what was just experienced continue after the curtain call.

So we are looking forward to the spring, and our ten dates with The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble at The Wild Project space in the East Village.  Spring… when the weather begins to warm, and people’s brains begin to turn on again for the few weeks before it gets insufferably hot.  Our New York debut!!  As usual, I hope everyone can come out and see this play.  But at least no one will be able to offer the excuse that it was snowing…



Video Promo

 



A Collection of Short Fiction in Progress

Leer and Keith SoundsmithWebRandom clips taken at Soundsmith Studios with the soundsmith himself, Leer Leary.

“The Odd Purgatory of My Personal Perception” is a collection of stories that have been kicked around on one laptop of mine or another for the past 15 years.  Some have said that they are not stories at all.  Maybe they’re right.  Some call them erotic short fiction.  Others have said that there is nothing erotic about them.  We’ll see…

Fourteen selections… or so… Small noises…  Big silences… Awkward, unbalanced, verbose, meandering prose in bite-sized pieces…

And it’s coming soon.

 Above:  Recording work on the short story, “God’s Children,” also excerpted below.

…She was God’s child, so he had thought; one of the ones that the Universe looks after because, for whatever reason, they didn’t end up here upon this seething orb of self-serving fuck-ups with the tools to fend for themselves, so he thought…  Dumber than a box of rocks, he’d thought, but as delicate and as lovely as an orchid.  And she smelled like vanilla ice cream.  She was the sort of vacuous that could be beyond sexy when the sexy wore it.  And he had not been looking for a lover that would be anything more than that: sexy, immediate, and unencumbering ever after.  He had few other reasons to subject himself to a barroom’s sensory barrage of boisterous humanity.  Everywhere else, feeling the oppressive weight of its incurious tumbling on, he navigated around the dumb motion of the masses as best his own too human condition could manage.  The only thing to be gotten by braving the concentration of festering crowd psychology that a Friday night tavern contained was the prize of some pretty diversion intent on receiving him without superfluous ceremony; something sweet and soft to distract his embattled heart and sate his hunger for an hour or two without making of itself a nuisance in the a.m., and she came dancing up to him from out of the aggregate of noise and dark and compressed bodies in a joint in Seattle, and stood at the bar staring at him, blankly, as her hips swayed to the bass beat of The Isley Brothers singing “Caravan of Love…”  

© Keith Hamilton Cobb


The Great City

On both sides of the crime and punishment equation there reside imposters in the great city.

choke18n-12-webThey are not difficult to identify, for they can be found seeking not to benefit the city, but to benefit themselves.  Criminals do this.  It is the very definition of their enterprise.  Seeking to benefit one’s self at the expense of the greater good is also a human failing, however.  Another is the tendency to cloak the criminal enterprise in rationale that either excuses it, or worse, dresses it up to look as though it is in support of the great city that one goes about one’s selfish business.

The great city strives to be just.  It does not strive for justice after the fact, for any mediocre society will show a semblance of making that effort.  There is no greatness in that.  The great city is just before the fact, always and only…  The great city defines itself by what is just, and the pursuit of justice presupposes that what is just has already been undone; that what is just has fled, and justice seeks but vainly to retrieve it.  But it cannot be gotten again.  We of the great city cannot, in our hearts, ask an eye for an eye.  If we know the difference between “just” and “justice” we cannot.  If we derive our solace and comfort from the punitive, we do not belongsiegel22e-1-web here, in the great, just city.  We of the great city know that restoring what is just can only mean doing the impossible; that we un-injure the injured, un-wrong the wronged, and return the dead to life.  We know that, in the just city, injustice cannot thrive, but once it has entered in, we cannot un-do the damage it does.  If it is here, then the just city has become unjust, and ungreat, and we can only start again, from the beginning, as a people, in the great city, to be just.

Because, in the great city, we are just, we must forgive cop and criminal alike.  We must admit, if we are just, and not seeking justice, that we cannot often tell them apart, and hope that they come to realize that they are both engaged in service to themselves, no matter what they would like to claim.  And we hope that they will forgive us, seeing that we are people, and not great, like them, in the great city.

MomentPanoramaWeb



The Other Me

Another me could’ve found a way
To hear the things you didn’t say,
And know what all you needed done,
Not you, but her, that other one.

I would have read the other’s mind,Red Door Web
Ignoring you she hid behind,
And held her when she needed touch,
And left her when I was too much;

And proven worthy of her trust,
Her grace, her company, her lust.
But I scarcely knew that she was there,
And, of the you I was aware,

She did the other you no good
To be not as the other would;
To disguise her so as I’d not see
What she was needing most of me.

But there was no other me to seek
The other you who did not speak;
Who just expected me to know
Her other heart she did not show,

And somehow to commiserate
With her who I first saw of late.

The one me did all he could do,
Having too late met the other you.

© 2014 Keith Hamilton Cobb


In Performance at Luna Stage Company

LunaStage AmMoor Poster

We needed a place to keep this thing on its feet without letting the summer go by; a place to keep the words in my mouth, the thoughts and ideas, so important to me, expressing through my body…  The good people of Luna Stage Company have offered me that opportunity.  Not only will this be a place to perform, an intimate ninety seat black box space, but, as a theatre that supports and develops new works, it will also afford me an opportunity to grow the piece, and to discuss it with an audience of smart, theatre-minded people, giving me the much needed reactions and feedback that will carry the work on to the next place.

Perhaps YOU can attend…  All info for the purchasing of tickets, directions, etc. are available HERE.

Please come be part of the discussion.  I’ll see you there.



Township Children 2

South Africa Portrait, Plettenberg Bay, SA December 2001 Kodak Tri-X 400

South Africa Portrait, Plettenberg Bay, SA December 2001 Kodak Tri-X 400 

 

South Africa Portrait, Plettenberg Bay, SA December, 2001 Kodak Tri-X 400

South Africa Portrait, Plettenberg Bay, SA December, 2001 Kodak Tri-X 400

 

 



“American Moor” in Performance: The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s Spring Rep, April, 2015

This Just In!

Anubis in The Jean Cocteau Repertory production of Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine.  Directed by Robert Hupp.  Costumes by Gregory Gale.

Anubis in The Jean Cocteau Repertory production of Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine. Directed by Robert Hupp. Costumes by Gregory Gale. 

So what if it’s far enough away on the calendar to birth a baby?  It is one, really…  I’ve worked with the prolific and dedicated artists at The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble over many years.  In fact, their predecessor, The Jean Cocteau Repertory, was the theatre where I worked my very first professional theatre gig in New York, as Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead in Jean Cocteau’s “The Infernal Machine,” how many ages ago??!!  I mean look at that guy above!  What was he, twelve?!!

Then, only just three or four winters ago, I was on stage with several of these same astonishing actors again at a beautiful black box space on the lower West Side called The Wild Project in their production of Tom Stoppard’s “Hapgood.”

With Craig Smith, co-artistic director of The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, performing in The Phoenix production of Tom Stoppard's "Hapgood," directed by John Giampietro.

With Craig Smith, co-artistic director of The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, performing in The Phoenix production of Tom Stoppard’s “Hapgood,” directed by John Giampietro.

They are thespians of integrity and intelligence, and intention, and vision who have known me throughout my entire professional career.  They were there when it began. And so I am excited for their announcement today of their 2014-15 rep season, and honored that they have taken an interest in this new work of mine.  So, April of 2015 will be “American Moor’s” New York City debut!  It could not happen amongst a more nurturing company of artists.  You’ll see, if you check out the links, that it’s a short run, (we will be running April 21-25, 2015 and May 5-10, 2015) and The Wild Project, while it could not be more perfect for this piece of theatre, is a small space.  So I encourage everyone to put us on their calendar, and reserve their seats early!!  You can save money on tickets if you order early.  If you’re local to New York, you may want to buy a package so that you can experience all of the remarkable work that The Phoenix Theatre’s coming season has to offer you.  Have a look here for ticket packages and discounts.

For single tickets, you can still purchase in advance at the online box office here.

The season calendar can be found here.

I’m really extremely proud to be a point of focus in the life of this theatre company.  And I’m proud of this evolving, and I think rather important work.

Please follow the updates, and join us next spring.

AmMoor Wild Project

“American Moor” is written and performed by Keith Hamilton Cobb, and is being directed by Paul Kwame Johnson.



Hudson Guild

Transp 1

Fujichrome Provia 400
Hollywood, CA

 



The Fair Weather Mystic: Another Introduction

I think somewhere (and when I say “somewhere” I mean in some state of awareness) there must be a place, a place and means, to play perpetually. Now some will maintain that we do play perpetually, “…dancing on this Earth for a short while” was what Cat Stevens called it, and may still, though the wandering marabout in him has since taken him searching in unexpected directions. But already I digress. The fair weather mystic is even peripatetic in his thoughts. Sorry. But, a place to play, perpetually, where all of one’s giving to this world, to life, is only the totality of one’s living; of one’s isness. This is more than a simple notion, even though it may very well be the true nature of life on Earth. For we are generally taught that more is expected of us than to simply live fully, and there are many interpretations of what “a full life” actually means. Or perhaps we are taught that life is a struggle, that no one owes us anything, and that we should expect to need to work for anything that we ever get or achieve. Make hay while the sun shines. Soon you’ll be dead. Many a mystic, particularly those of the fair weather variety have heard these admonitions, and, though they strive, cannot quite disbelieve them. And if they can’t, how shall I expect all of greedy corporate America, or you, or the world, to do any better?

HopeSignweb

There is a breed of mystic, the pure ascetic, the 24/7 sadhu that walks through the world with nothing, and, in essence, attempting to be nothing, egoless, an empty vessel.  And one of the many things that he, in his life-long practice, has emptied from his vessel of being is fear.  The pure ascetic is unconcerned, not that nothing could harm him, but rather what could it matter in the least if something did… However, while this is an attractive state of mind, I think he may also be incapable of appreciating, for instance, the beauty in the work of his own hands. I doubt he would derive any pleasure from the sexual admiration of another seeking his company. For such things as these require some ego.

For each wrung below him on the spiritual ladder I suspect we must take upon us some concern. Worry… I am a fair weather mystic. I want to know with certainty that all is well, and provided for, including me, if not me primarily. But I will not step into nothing to see. It requires too much of me. I am not that disciplined. My bliss remains preconceived. It is of something that I already recognize. To hold and defend those preconceptions is of the ego; of my ability to say what is. I needn’t defend them. In fact, I know they are the height of bullshit. Yet I have them. To have them is probably of ego too, but could it be of less ego?  Could I be slightly enlightened to know that all I act from is human, because I AM?

I am a fair weather mystic. I know that doing what I do and seeing what I see is not all that I could do or could see, and yet I know as well that it is me (there’s that ego!) and being me, a perfect imperfection, that it is no less a perfect contribution into this earthly everything than the sadhu’s nothing.

Try to get this.  There will be a quiz.



Fulcrum

Splitting Logs 2

Shit, I’m older now.
Elbows ache and knees more.
“You’re only as strong as your weakest link,” they say.
But I can still drop that twelve pound maul
On the flat of a fat maple log,
Snort hard and send the severed halves flying in submission.  Bang!!  Fuckin’ay
badass, hardass machine for breakin’ shit,
That’s gotta be what, from the soles of my feet planted,
Swinging through the back, through the shoulders, through the length of my arms,
Through the length of that steel handle, what,
Maybe eight, maybe
Nine hundred foot-pounds at the point of contact at least?  I don’t know the math.
My daddy, he’s slow.
Crooked and squat,
His body ain’t no fulcrum
For an axe that heavy swinging any more.
For him, twelve pounds overhead can’t be more than, what,
A hundred or so pounds at the target?  Maybe two.  I don’t know the math.
I know that dense, wet wood isn’t so scared of him like it used to be when I was small.
He doesn’t seem to mind.  Maybe he does.
I do.  But he doesn’t say much.
But he’ll whack away at it,
Shuffling and crouching,
Lifting with a grunt to set it right when he’s half missed it, and knocked it
Tumbling off the stump.
Heaving that hammer and dropping it
‘Till that log surrenders, and the halves drop off to either side
like executed soldiers, mostly bludgeoned to death….
Lives can weaken if we don’t nourish them,
So as there’s less for a Spirit to swing from.
That’s not his problem.
Me, I’ll blast through that whole pile of logs and stack it in an hour
So he doesn’t have to, and
So I’ve got something to show.

© Keith Hamilton Cobb


It Will Be A Miracle…

…If You Can Read A Course in Miracles

You will never buy a book written by a truly enlightened person.  The closest you may come is a transcript of a talk he/she was giving to someone, or group of someones for free.  You will sit, or walk about, and wander through this human experience alone making what use you might of The Master’s presence, or perhaps having no awareness of it at all.  But each of ours is a singular experience, and you are “right” just by making a choice, even if your choice is divining how everyone else is “wrong.”

At that Santa Monica school, they were fond of asking, “Would you rather be right, or in the Love?”  Since I sit at the feet of The Master, a captive audience of sorts, I figure I am always in the Love.  Being that that’s taken care of, I’d like to be right.  I am right.  But I don’t plan on making a case of it, or changing anybody for it.

According to all of the books and DVD’s all the new-thoughters are selling on quantum theory for dummies, we can power-of-positive-think ourselves right into anything we want.  So why then should any of them need to slang books and DVD’s?  Well, the argument goes, for those mystics feeling argumentative, “This is a mode to disseminate this information, which is as intrinsic to the creative vision as anything that I have prayed up for myself.  What serves all serves me, and visa versa.”  I’ll buy that.  Though, You-too-can-have-anything-you-desire schemes for the masses are probably a bad bet.  The masses never really want world peace, generally speaking.  They want a boat.  I know I do.  There is no cumulative consciousness towards transcendence because there are very few individual ones.  Bodies prevent that mostly, which is probably why The Master feeds us this stuff through an eyedropper over multiple lifetimes.

And why a lifetime at all; a body-bound lifetime of reactions and erroneous ideas?  Course in Miracles says we made it all up.  It says it about ten million times embedded in page after page of obtuse prose, supposedly the channeled voice of Christ, or the Christ Consciousness.  And why not?  I read the book.  It had to be too hard to write that shit for some fair weather mystic like me to have done it.  But anyway, it says we created this illusion of separation from God that we cling to; that our self-imposed sense of separation is as good as actually being separate…  The good news is it’s only a sense, and as soon as we chose to stop sensing it we will no longer be separate, but since we sense it, we’re pretty much fucked, because the sense that we’re sensing was being sensed before we were born, so that this is now the cumulative reality, rather than the still and unthreatening Oneness with Spirit that we might have if we weren’t so busy not having it. No one’s fault.  Just the unfortunate situation wherein we discover ourselves to have created ourselves with no clue as to how we did it, or how to undo it.  See how silly this stuff gets from the get-go?  It posits that we are, in fact, One with The Divine, but are too crazy to be aware of it, which is not to say that it will necessarily be any easier to be aware of our oneness once we stop being crazy.  In fact, the chances of stopping being crazy are quite slim, and so it might be better to get cozy with the idea that, no matter how One you are, you’re never gonna much experience it in it’s nirvanaesque beatitude.  I would suggest that the relative truth of that, if you follow the breadcrumbs, would also make me way too crazy, or practical, to spend the next five or six years trying to digest the impossible and repetitively obscure scribblings in that way too big book when the upshot is that we remain forever at The Master’s feet, probably by design.  Didn’t I say that?  I said that, didn’t I?



Fair Weather Mysticism

Where to begin?

The fact is you’ve begun and there’s not a thing you can do about it.  Keep doing what you’re doing and try not to be a dick.

FriendshipSignweb

I am forever seated at the feet of The Master.  It is a perpetual circumstance.  Something like being mentally retarded and not possessing enough proper brain function to wonder, much less deduce why.  My supplication at The Master’s feet is not, as many of the bookstore adepts would suggest, an awe-inspiring journey of wonder and discovery.  In fact, the awe that it seems to inspire is most often a fascination with how endlessly uninspiring it all is. Read More →



Township Children

Township Children, Plettenberg Bay, SA, Fuji Velvia 100, December, 2001

Township Children, Plettenberg Bay, SA, Fuji Velvia 100, December, 2001

 



Pay Me!!

I Know a Couple of Secrets That Would Make Your Life Better.Many bundle of US 100 dollars bank notes       

You wanna know’m?                                        

Pay me!!

This dumb shit is as old as the scribes and Pharisees.  The truth is (and I give it to you for nothing, because it is worth nothing if I give it, but only worth something if you receive it, which might have something to do with why it is called “the received word,” and not “the delivered, dictated, or SOLD word”) most people who are possessed of any real knowledge are not looking to sell it to you.  In fact, the very act of putting a price tag on truth nearly guarantees that the peddler has none to sell you, and very little if any true awareness of his/her own.

I had considered Transcendental Meditation for a brief while.  It felt to me like something proactive to do, something besides just sit there.  Nothing wrong with just sitting per se, one of my most favorite things.  Most fair weather mystics will sit and search in more or less equal measure on the path to transcendence, which comes eventually whether they chose to do either, or neither, but only makes you feel like you’ve earned your enlightenment in any egoistic sense if you get up off your ass.  The funny thing here is that if you need to feel as if you’ve earned your enlightenment, you are still more or less wholly ego-influenced, which means you haven’t been enlightened at all.  Ya gotta laugh at this shit!  Anyway, the sitting, as I expressed, particularly if you sit in anticipation of revelation, can, in the least case, strain patience, or, in more acute manifestations become boring to the point of madness where one gets up and runs screaming into the arms of the for-profit gurus simply to break up the monotony, which is more or less what I did on any number of occasions.  Frightened by visions of having sat there forever and breathing my last unenlightened breath to the sound of The Master’s derisive laughter, I undertook to “learn” something. Read More →



Pay Me, Part 2

Can’t Buy Me Love

               I can’t sell me any either…

There is a school in Santa Monica, California (Where else would it be?) that offers advanced degrees (advanced as far as they are concerned) in what they call Spiritual Psychology.  I sat with them for the better part of the first year of a two year program, again because the part of me that was satisfied with sitting at the Master’s feet was not, and could not be, on speaking terms with the part of me that wasn’t.  My brain and body needed something to refute.  For some serious money, I got that in spades.  This corporation of consciousness peddling sold class jewelry to augment its income to a student body many of whom were eager to buy both its brand of sensibility and symbology (yes, it’s a word, because I said so).  I suspect that to those who bought from the table of trinkets at a purported school of advanced spiritual study, the rings and pendants and things where tokens to commemorate their having been to that particular mountaintop, and having communed with the two latter day gurus that abided their.  And the gurus spoke their nostrums, codified and specific, from a raised platform to congregations of hundreds at a time, a great many of whom listened and fell in line with an almost cult-like obedience, regurgitating ideology in language verbatim.  Such, I think, are the manifestations of the raw panic that we are in, we body-bound, searching for any port in a storm.  I watched for the gurus to behave in ways contrary to what they perpetually espoused.  They did.  I knew they would.  After all, they were me, as were the four hundred or so seekers hoping for access to a higher truth, and hoping that higher truth would bring them a better boyfriend, or a bigger income.  Perhaps some found it.  Some must have.  But I had been hoping, in my need, that I would not find myself among them, that the peddlers speaking down from the dais at least, body-bound as they were, would actually be people more of Spirit than of flesh, and that when I watched and listened to them I would not see me.  But there I was, stamped all over their insecurity, and inauthenticity, and even in perhaps their lack of awareness that what they were about was anything but perfect.  Or was it my lack of awareness?  Were they not perfect as it related to me and my spiritual advance?  And was I not even a little bit enlightened if I realized just that much? Read More →



Lesson 2

Meditation is overrated…

TakenbyDes2

…at least it is in the rarified form that it is sold to us.  When I say the word, does it evoke images of sitting cross-legged on the floor with wrists resting upon your knees, palms turned up with thumbs gently pressing second fingers?  I think there are probably only a few thousand people across the entire planet who can actually sit that way in comfort for any period of time.  I might be dead wrong about that.  I’m dead wrong about most truths, as you are, and every other one of the human species is.  But I haven’t met very many who could…  But more to the point, whether you’re forcing yourself to maintain uncomfortable postures while you try to achieve a state of nothingness or not, the court stenographer of your life that resides in your brain will begin reading back the transcript as soon as there is nothing more tangible to distract you.  This is a process of the human mind.  It will not go away.  You’re stuck with it until you die.  With persistence, you can for moments overcome it, and achieve the stillness where something that might slightly enlighten you lives, maybe…  But a truly meditative state, where you have completely turned off all of your mental processes, and you are actually engaging in productive communion with your “inner voice,” or better still, the silence is rare, and highly unlikely. Read More →



A Child’s Wisdom

When we are young, we have no sense of our own wisdom.  We view anyone we perceive as showing the slightest wisdom to be more enlightened than ourselves, and we are impressed.  And we adopt their wisdom… well… we attempt to emulate it, not at all discerning that their wisdom is just an ignorance that doesn’t look particularly like our own.

As we age, and as, unwittingly, the wisdom we were born with dissipates and disappears in the inundation of fabricated data that the culture smothers us in which we collect calling it education, we begin to perceive ourselves to be wise.  Suddenly, those whose ignorances don’t look particularly like our own appear to us as ignorant.  Neither we, nor they are able to recognize that we both remain children, and wise beneath the piles of detritus that growing and interacting in a culture without aware and un-agenda’d elders has required us to operate through.

Jeff's NYC Subway

Photo by Jeff Evans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are childish, not child-like.  We have forgotten what it is to be child-like.  We will be more wise, when we can become child-like; lose the sense of our own wisdom once again.



An Aquarius Full Moon

It’s an Aquarius Full Moon tonight.
Somebody told me that’s what it was, and I saw it, hanging
Bold and unapologizing in the sky, when I let out the dog to do his last of the evening thing.
Being an Aquarius, I suspected that
Ought to have meant something to me.  In fact,
I was sure it did.  I Googled it and found a lot about it having to do with compassion and
Service and selflessness, yadadayadadayadada.  But
For all that,
All I could think of was that
We looked up at it the other night, you and I, and decided that
It wasn’t quite there yet.  And that
Later I reached across the cab of the truck and took your hand.  Or was it before?

SaturnMoonweb

“Does Saturn Have an Aquarius Full Moon?” Acrylic on wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Either way,
It was like a boy.  And
You held my hand, simply, but
Held it,
As if maybe you know a little something
Of boys, and how they’ll
Sometimes reach across the cabs of trucks on warm nights when
The moon is nearly full,
Putting every one of their fears, frustrations, and doubts into the hope that
There’s just a little love over there.  And how they’ll wanna
Weep when they find it; wanna
Hide in it, that
Hand they’re holding, but
They’ve been acting like men too long.  Tonight,
It’s an Aquarius Full Moon.  I wondered
If you saw it.  Then
I wondered where you were.

© 2007 Keith Hamilton Cobb
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