Flower Moon Dispatch
Poems After Simmering
"Learning to Walk Back Into Your Life" - Sometimes I go about pitying myself and all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky. - from an Anishinaabe song, documented by ethnologist Frances Densmore, early 1900s - We've all been raised in a You Can't Let Down Because You Have to Keep Holding It All Together culture. Most everyone dresses well and conjures the occasional smile between polite surface small talk. In a You Can't Let Down Because You Have to Keep Holding It All Together culture there are only small sips of joy. We enter a trance as we do our living and that trance causes a deep forgetting. It's like one day you're walking down the sidewalk and you suddenly have the sensation of having stepped out of yourself. Maybe it was a loss. Maybe it was a betrayal. Maybe it's the million-and-one details. Maybe it is a primal disappointment in one's own country. For whatever reason, you're no longer standing in the life you thought you were leading. Stone Lake, of flowers and vases fame, had his own disappointment. It led him to say: "Southern Zen. Northern Zen. I've tried it all. This hermit has his own philosophy now. Time to devote myself to my hillwalker's stick." _______ "The Practice of Purification" __ between thunder claps chorus of midnight tree frogs — purification __ Sometimes the dust of the world sticks to us. Weighs us down. Distorts our vision. Without knowing it, we can even carry the dust from one place to another, from one room to another. We cease to see the other. We don't hear. This is why purification upon departing purification upon arrival becomes a thread-guide for heart-mind. Otherwise we end up haunting one another with ghosts we didn't know were attached to us. _______ "Deep Within Mysterious Shade" - eve of the Flower Moon There comes a point in some Wayfarer's lives when the words flowing off the brush are no longer yours. The words arrive from some other source beyond the fabricated "self" like messages coming in from far across a valley. The other side of the valley is all shade murky gray dark blue-gray steam dark dragon-green clouds slithering 'round rhododendrons dark dark-enigma dark. And if you keep walking the Road the Road deepens your humanity; leaves you with no choice but to stand inside your life and surrender the brush to the words making themselves known to you. _______ "Flower Moon Tea" When the dipper in the sky turns just so out pours starlight renewal. Sky nectar finally reaches the tongue having passed through cloud air stone river bend into tea pot into leaf into steam into a cup called luminous abyss. The two-word teaching arrives. Stay open. _______ "The River One" _ Good fortune comes to determined Wayfarers. - Hexagram 56, The Wayfarer, I Ching _ At first, The Way feels like a river — 'out there'; a river far from you. Though subtle, you feel it, hear it, sense it, beyond. The river calls to you. With time, you aren't any more certain. Is it that you draw closer to the river or does the river draw nearer to you? Then, one day, you realize there is no 'you' — only the river. You see then: you have always been in the river. There has never been a 'you' separate from the river. The Way is not something you do. The Way is something you are. You, The River, One.
© 2026 / Frank Inzan Owen / The Luminous Procession: Poems From Within and Beyond the World of Red Dust
soundworlds: “Humid Heat” and “The Calling” / Intersecting Skies / Roy Mattson