where darkness gives way
to her luminescent shape,
energy remains

*
I was listening to that George Noory fellow on the radio one night last week while driving home. He was talking to someone who suggested that perhaps things we perceive as ghostly visions could well be leftover energy. Energy doesn’t begin or end in the classic sense; it merely transfers from one form to another. So the idea of ghosts being the energy leftovers of what they were before made sense to me.

While I’ve never seen anything I’d refer to as a ghost, I do believe, as Teilhard de Chardin suggested, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience and not the other way around. From that paradigm, energy as an element of spirit doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

image: koke

the whispering trees
leave the shrubbery taunted
by airborne secrets.

So I had a wife – beautiful, like you, who tells me, I worry too much; who tells me, I ought to smile more; who gambles, and gets in deep with sharks.

One day they carve her face. We have no money for surgeries. She can’t take it!

I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars.
– The Joker (from The Dark Knight)

I pulled into the parking lot at 10 a.m. Sunday morning. Before even getting out of the car, I noticed the bike with the fendered 26-inch wheels, old-fashioned handlebars, overstuffed seat and more improvised saddlebags than I thought a bike could hold. It occupied a good portion of the sidewalk leading to the front door of the restaurant. It was a slightly odd sight in this neighborhood, one comprising almost entirely middle to upper class residents. And within three seconds of entering the establishment, I could identify the bike’s owner.

There in the northwest corner of the place, sat a wiry, 40-something caucasian male with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and matching stubble. He wore stained khaki workpants, a greasy t-shirt, worn cross-trainers and a weak smile he flashed intermittently at the service staff as they moved between the kitchen and the dining area, shooting not so subtle glances at him. Upon seeing his smile, the thing that struck me was how straight and clean his teeth appeared to be.

It made me wonder where he’d come from – more demographically than geographically. Against the backdrop of a fairly upscale Sunday morning crowd mostly attired in church clothes, he struck me as someone who could rather easily be transformed into one of them, at least on the surface.

Was he a recent victim of the economic downturn, or was he a foreigner to this middle class world? Did he look at the rest of us, knowing what our lives were like? Did he flash that fleeting smile because he knew the restaurant service staff and patrons who seemed to look down on him were really only a few steps from his circumstance?

Being only ten years younger than him at the most, I thought about how slight a twist of fate it would take to find myself in his tattered shoes.

what makes you happy
is rarely the same as what
makes them think you are.

photo: Tracy O