the first of a flurry of vids on their way... part of a worldwide collaboration with hundreds of individuals and dozens of communities in 14 countries... credits forthcoming!

Homestays from Where There Be Dragons on Vimeo.

This is a year for giving:
clear-eyed, we become open-hearted.
Release tight-fisted lonelinesses
in group hugs, we encompass all our sick selves.
We surrender our wound-up and wounded insides into the earth,
the hoarded riches of our selves rushing into her warm embrace;
humbled to our knees,
vomiting and shitting out what we do not need
into ancient tunnels that take all into the sacred river
that accepts all pollution
and gives by giving up its own purity:
divinity come down down down to earth.
Likewise, we level our small selves to exhaustion
stretching ourselves thin to brittle breaking
so others may be full to brimming
and so fill our newfound emptiness grown in our expanded boundaries.
Freed from our own clutches,
we give ourselves a break, and give in to break-throughs
as we give way
to the sweet offerings of milk and smiles
we have so long denied our severe, separated and starved selves.
We give gods to ourselves, to each other,
to the caves and temples,
to the rice paddies and filthy alleys,
gods in cosmos-imbued stones and bowls and bells and paintings
and poems.

This is a year for joyfulness:
reveling in richnesses, we give the world permission to thrive.
We pardon our sad poverties for the suffering they heap upon simply being poor,
and extend a laughing hand to our haughty unhappiness, pulling it down
to roll around in the grass with us,
to smoke a joint in bed
and giddily watch the wow of the world in slow-motion.
We sit in pain and thank its power to unclench our head's fingers
from its hold on our souls,
so that we may spring rejoicing straight through our crowns
and into the ecstatic cosmos.
We dance in wild figures of eights intertwined: knots of infinities,
our feet blissfully making love with time and space
with that bee-bop ta-tha-ta dance,
with new stomp that unmakes existence as we know it
and the old drum that brings us back into the familiar beat
calling us to get back up to boogie back down,
to leap swimmingly into the air and down to the river like a homemade kite,
rejoicing in the breath of the moment
as a hungry child cries rejoicing in a mango out of season,
as a pilgrim cries rejoicing, after years of walking in exile,
in the sight of their spiritual home,
surrounded by their sisters and brothers
in that enraptured bliss born out of the blooming lotus of pain
that is holy joy.

This is a year for integrity:
becoming the change we hope for the world, we heal.
We practice what we preach, and only preach through practice.
We teach peace with every step, being imperfectly in the perfect moment:
ringing what bells still ring,
forgetting perfect offerings to perfect gods,
we know the crack that runs through everything
lets in the light which illuminates all.
We radicalize the interconnectedness of reality,
rooting down like the bodhi,
calmly stretching like her branches;
rhizoming out-up-in like ginger,
infusing our metabolic movement with his nodal energy.
We cognize, recognize, decognize and dive in to dissolve
those manifold manifestations of the multiverse
and find the buddha within as she smiles
in the passing stranger, praying and cursing,
in the filthy child with outstretched hand,
a hand asking to be held, a voice asking for change,
eyes demanding change,
presence requiring to be held in the same world as palaces for dead kings.
We contemplate,
we caress,
we cry out in yearning to integrate,
and slowly, with the care and calm of walking meditation,
of being held by the branches of aerially rooted trees,
of feeling out kora around high transcendence-striving temples,
we become whole.