THE FAMILY ALBUM Page One: "Neruda Speaks"

   A family album is filled with snapshots -- moments crystalized out of the liquid flow of time.  They celebrate the past and, in images such as those of graduations and weddings, they celebrate hopes for the future as well.

  Even those images which 'only' celebrate the past are useful in co-creating the future, since as we gaze upon them we remember all that caused these bittersweet moments to be as they were, and think of some altered behavior of our own which in a similar future situation might result in a better reality for all.

  Thus we are naturally drawn, at times of confusion and upheaval, to contemplate images of our past, and of our hopes -- feeling for what guiding messages they might have for us.

  Though a family's album bears the name and locations of its creators, anyone else who views its images sees immediately so many similarities to those in their own albums that they frequently come to feel they know the people in the pictures personally -- and indeed, then, so they do!

   The name of the family which this album celebrates is the human family.  Its pages will be filled with reflections both of this family's long wanderings and searchings in the past and of the future which it is learning now to co-create, using the wonderful diversity of wisdoms which it has gathered along the way.

   The family includes as well many visitors both 'incarnate' (wearing a human outer body) and 'disincarnate' (wearing any other body) who are here to assist in the successful administration of our coming burst of light.  We welcome you with gratitude and in joy!  You are family.  We honor and bless you!

   In any family, one or more members takes a proprietary interest in maintaining this or that album.  In this case we have a team of spirit poets and visionaries (Emerson wrote that "it takes a thousand such to make a scribe"), who delight in synthesizing and making available to you the images which will appear on these pages over time.

   Our own scribe, Analee, is one member of this vast team.  Her contributions are a clear spirit, two physical hands with which to operate a pen or keyboard for us all, and a lifelong body of research in alternative social and spiritual methodology with regard to human relations with self, family, society and the celestial realm. 

   These researches have been planet-wide, pan-historic and pre-historic, as well as inclusive of theoretical realities created by visionaries of the future. 

   Thus: The Lakota Indians of North America developed an interesting and useful way to keep the children in line when necessary, as did also but otherwise the ancient Alaskan tribes and those of the South American jungles.  The Tibetans too have a strong view on this subject, and lack of self-esteem is so unknown in their culture that their Dalai Lama was utterly astounded to find it the primary cause of therapy in our own... 

   And so: Through grievous mismanagement and much unnecessary suffering it was at last understood that the dietary requirements for wellness belonging to one heritage and body-type are not those of another...

  It is always difficult to know what to put on the first page of an album.  Which single image contains enough facets truly to represent and introduce the whole?  The answer must be: none of them!

   Fortunately, we already have a request from Shift Central to share verse formerly channeled by our scribe.  The poem became published in a chapbook entitled 'Didn't We Dance?' by Artaud's Elbow, out of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and has been performed by spontaneous audience request in that city since.

   This particular piece (...as it turns out, our Family Album's main introductory image -- exciting!...) is channeled from a single entity, whose name is Pablo Neruda.  He would like us all to know that he takes an active and admiring interest in Wandering Wolf's words and works. 

   It was written decades ago, at a time when our scribe was just becoming aware of the channeled nature of her own works even since childhood, and thus it is still phrased as Neruda's energy coming through her aware perspective, rather than as his perspective streaming, as it were, through her pen alone as it would have been with increasing clarity in the years following. 

   Be that as it may, its spirit authorship has been spontaneously recognized and named by poetic scholars who have heard it performed nationwide.

   Our scribe has a personal history with Neruda's spirit as well:  His last unpublished manuscript -- one which, addressed to the Campesinos, assisted in seeding the Mexican Revolution -- was given by the widow in Guatemala to a close friend of Analee's who had unearthed it at the village library, and who then brought it back to Sacramento to translate.  The work of that translation subsequently went forward in the house in which both she and he lived at the time.

   Off of one corner of our first page's central, Neruda-generated word image we find a smaller, slightly faded picture, this one created by the team as a whole, which reflects this translator and his assistant at work on the manuscript. 

   In offering it we wish to apologize:

   Since the input system for this forum is new and largely untried -- and, as well, since electromagnetic anomalies have followed our scribe throughout her life -- though we have labored to produce clear titles and verses we have not overcome the 'mind of its own' which seems just now to be generating random forms of type... nor can we seem to remove the word "in" from the upper-left corner of our offering: veeeeery mysteeerious!!!

  So please assume that the first line you see is larger than the others and set a little above them, constituting a title, and that the rest then follow in smaller and less bold type -- and ignore any verse breaks you like... 

   ... And a blessing on our hardworking Shift Central members who are driving themselves crazy trying to get us all off the ground around here!  A few kinks in the system we can live with -- we have you guys to thank that there is a system at all.

   So then, the corner picture:


two poets...  
oblivious of the sirens
screaming around them
they spend every evening
immersed in their books
together like brothers
heads bowed o'er the pages
savoring every tiny dry word
in their mouths till it
gathers up juice and the rest of us
wonder
what it is
that is running in such waterfalls
down their cheeks



  The main image, now, in the center of our first page, may well have been the best one to choose after all... It describes the paths walked by each one of us here to reach this intersection in the textured fabric of earthly space and time: to arrive at the center of this family.  We offer here it in tribute to all of you. 


this is the passion...

...with which the deafening beethoven
pounded his piano
the passion
that saw ghandi dwindle away
like the hunger strikers into just

skin and bone, this
is the knife edged, unfulfilled
passion
which set christ to writhing
on the cross the passion
of life which springs up from
cracks in cement
and endures the footsteps
of the passing masses

this is the howling
which followed the early ones
into the lions' dens
over the prairies
across the bulwarks behind the lines
of the enemy camp
which spiraled down with each kamikaze
and finds its home

underground
in the deep damp woods or
city sewers
howling among the workers
of all the past present and future
resistances
of the world this

is the knowledge
guarded
with the suffering silence of

untold generations
of plain humble wizards
unrobed, aescetic
free in their bondage
wand'rers of air the
burning
liquid rolling in waves
through their veins
the burning
of human torches who have yearned to be free

and who would not be silent
because the words
rose up and spilled forth
from their tongues like
honey the draught
spoken of
all through the ages
requiring a pure vessel
for its ultimate
volatile essence

this is the passion this
must be the passion
nothing can stem its flow
not my four year old
kid's hippo slippers, not
all the cold, heavy metal
of all the machinery
of all the world
not

my own tender smallness not the
desire for
something to eat or drink
in this godforsaken place
where i happened to be
when this happening found me
not even the shortage of
paper at hand
since it, after all

can still be scratched in the dirt...

this is the connection
this is the substance
this was the message
they all tried to
get across
this is the desire
for the life that was ours
before time began

and could be again
this is the intoxicating
possible
vision, this
is and always has been
the passion