My heart: a wildly improvised thing, a simple machine, all of wire and string

delicate, sputtering, powerful

My mind:  a well-framed window askew in a mudbrick wall standing with no ceiling in the vast landscape of me and you

My body: an electrical storm grounded to the Earth spinning in space

My spirit: a light breath of the grace that the Hurricane blows in each tiny flow

I had a dream:
I cradle my dear friend's head
in a sweet hotspring at dusk or dawn
and nothing can go wrong.
We say not a word at the visit of Hummingbird on wing,
and knowing we wouldn't see each other for a year,
we shed no tears
as I recall another dream:

I imagine tending a fire by the stream
down from my once-lover's home up the hill
where I try clumsily to help in the kitchen,
and think to give her new husband and baby a sapling.
I do not stay, we do not sing,
but simply are together as I move, softly, to other dreams:

Everything moves, I miss half the cues,
and the train's always leaving.
I lead seekers through muraled labyrinths
and battle nausea on shoot-out seas
where huge beasts –that I heard about from my ancestors– leap
flashing surprising colors and elegance in flight in Amazonian moonlight
before they dive back down into rivers divine
that seen from above join to make the infinite sign
with tributaries radiating serpentine out–
visions of my soul: rhizome veins that connect what they will when I can
be still.

Expanding Horizons

I was going to post each chapter of this video one-by-one, but I've decided just to release the whole shebang here, and refer you to this page if you want to see the 8 stand-alone videos.

So...

Here is Expanding Horizons, as I have been thinking of the project, or as Where There Be Dragons, who commissioned it, is calling it: How We Travel.

This is a collaborative, education- and community-based video project, featuring the work of Dragons' students, educators, and partner communities worldwide. I co-wrote the script in collaboration with the Dragons community of experiential educators and guides.  I then directed instructors and students in 15 countries on 4 continents, and personally filmed in 7 countries. Total, including the musicians, we were well over 100 contributors in as many communities.

My deepest gratitude to everyone who participated, who are too many to name, though I've done my best to credit everyone who had a direct contribution here.

This video draws from Dragons’ Summer, Semester, Gap-Year, College Accredited, and Custom programs worldwide. Dragons students and instructors recorded all of the images, words, and music in the field, with help and inspiration from local communities. The relationship with local communities is an integral component of the Dragons experience, as families share their homes, temples, villages, music, and wisdom with our students, and through them, with the world. We have aspired to honor, and do justice to, this relationship through this video, both in product and process.

Enjoy.

How We Travel: Dragons Summer Abroad & Semester Programs from Where There Be Dragons on Vimeo.

Rugged Travel from Where There Be Dragons on Vimeo.

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.

Dragons Global Video Project

First fruits of my travels in Asia, and collaborations with good people worldwide... more to come!

Where There Be Dragons Global Video Project from Where There Be Dragons on Vimeo.

This video was created entirely with images, words, and music recorded by Dragons students and instructors in collaboration with local communities (representing 15 countries) who shared their homes, temples, villages, families, music and presence with us. Over 100 contributors from around the world conspired to weave together the poetry and magic of this experimental collaboration, "Where There Be Dragons' Global Video Project."

Credits here

Where are all the people at?

mostly in Indian subcontinent and E China, it appears...

source

Mi tesis de maestría

Expandiendo la percepción de lo posible - la intervención en espacios públicos en el documental by Mateo Hinojosa on Scribd

when they ask me
(or godforbid when They ask me)
what exactly I'm doing just standing there
where I should be circulating and going about my business,
I just tell them:
I'm watching rabbits who are listening to me...
epa! there they went, you just missed them!

Counting breath instead of minutes

Counting breath instead of minutes,

air flows infinite

as you sit in it

adjusting mind to spirit.

Epics-to-be sling hooks of hope

at mind's great tapestry;

the feeble weave of consciousness

unravels, sends its threads into cosmos.

Currents electric like Northern Lights

carry crackle of deep-night sparkle,

the bright cackal of glee in silent dark peace:

it isn't me, I'm all, empty.

Mi último videito, de una nueva novela argentina (muy recomendada). Jugando con voces, sonidos y fotos.

Memorias del Viento - una novela de Jorge Torres Zavaleta from Mateo Hinojosa on Vimeo.

Another Rebirth

There was, as there always is,

the Fiery Moment:

You burst into flames

at the sight of the Angel of Death

when she walked in what was your front door,

pointed at you, then out at the wide wild world.

Your denial died as you drowned in her eyes

and saw your long-time love in need

of more than you now provide.

Then, the Time of Reeling:

stumbling, stunned, eyes drowning

in the haze, mind ablaze,

the Angel now came cruel.

You clutched at your chest (of fool's gold)

as her claws sank deep,

tearing away hard-won hopes and fears - more fuel for the reblooming fire

And then, when all was burnt into past, the Time of Ash:

in you and about you, all fell apart

and you let the pieces lie,

let wind and passersby scatter the bits of you

in the land you once called home, held as your own,

and bit by irretrievable bit, you let it all go,

grieving the lost soul.

You would have walked away to see fairer horizons...

but neither your legs nor your eyes had survived.

Finally, the Time to be Fallow:

pure presence of emptiness

patience

stillness

surrender.

First you harden, then slowly, selectively soften,

yielding to layers of ash,

inhaling new nutrients.

Your deep earth gathers unto itself fertility

for another rebirth.

maybe you thought that you'd decide

that there would be plans to understand

but forget free will or saving your hide

the world is taking you for a ride

don't despair though, soul's on your side

you've got the wiles, wares and spirit

to do it, to see your way though it

to let the path find your feet and then move it

you've go the let go to let the need flow

to let the dead breathe some grow into seeds you know

to give earth to future whispering come now and grow

you may not know how but listen

just listen