Shit, piss, blood, and vomit, though unpleasant, do not deter me from my duties to nurture and comfort in the face of adversity.
Being one-eighth Scottish means some of my genes come from Norsemen, savages who hacked gods to pieces and hung their flesh from trees. Brave explorers and noble warriors who fear only feeble old age and death in bed.
Perhaps that explains my ability to thrive in the emergency room to remain calm, even peaceful in the midst of chaos, to laugh and joke while battling death, dismemberment, and contagion.
During breaks my colleagues often ask how I can eat pizza dripping with red sauce, oozing with mozzarella after spending hours titrating medicinal poisons, cleaning and dressing festering wounds, and mopping up bodily fluids.
As I pour another cup of muddy twelve-hour coffee, I simply sip, laugh, and blame it all on that powerful— Viking DNA.
Everything living and nonliving is speaking, shouting, singing if you know how to listen.
Nature is the gods’ second set of scripture, all of existence, good and evil, pure and impure, is the language of the gods.
Spirit and nature drink to one another, sing and dance together, and tell one another abstruse and comforting miracle tales.
Take delight in creatures and things; all are the writings of the gods, their signatures visible to those who learn to see.
The teeming multiplicity of each leaf and toenail, specific in form and function exist in relation to all others.
Unity of the gods balanced by negativity and evil is divinity wrestling with itself.
Each sound, voice, and speech is manifesting and declaring spirit, assuming form in Nature herself.
Do not rebel against your desires, seize them and bind them, do not stifle your surging powers, let them work at holy work, and rest a holy rest.
Your own character, qualities which make you what you are, constitute your own special approach to the divine.
Reality does not end at the edge of eternity. If only we will pay attention, distressing worldly contradictions are there to allow discovery of their intrinsic significance.
In each nook and cranny, in every flash of light, in every shadow, every god’s intent is clearly written beyond the bounds of earthly existence.
Every profane act is rendered sacred by the manner in which it is performed. To discover the mystical, we need go no further than the most ordinary of our ordinary experiences.
As I stare fixedly out the window at the grey, rainy winter afternoon, my mind meanders, eventually settling strangely enough on fundamentals.
It is fundamentals that are the building blocks of society, without which culture collapses like an agitated soufflé.
The fundamental nature of pizza, like the edge of a sharpened chef’s blade, is that it is meant to be piping hot, delivered to your doorstep in a brown, slogan-covered cardboard container by a pimply-faced teen who refers to everyone, regardless of age, gender, or ethnicity, as “you guys.”
Waiting for a pizza while sitting at a linen-covered table with china and non-disposable silverware is probably one of the sins they say Jesus died for.
As I stare fixedly out the window at the grey, rainy winter afternoon, my day grows brighter as my right index finger pushes speed dial and the voice at the other end says cheerfully “Dante’s Slice, can I take your order?”
A bird, a leaf, the wind. These words linger in torchlit alleys. Strange music flows from golden horns. Serene blossom-scented music, settles uncomfortably on a blistered landscape.
Golden-eyed hag sings from a haggard throat, accompanied by choruses of crusty crones.
Why do we weep?
Like dust in the throat, words long forgotten. Different answers, all incomplete. Sometimes life catches you off-guard, then, you notice the answer sleeping soundly in your hand.
Desert Dweller 