Poetry pouring out as binary code

Poetry pouring out as binary code:
initiated by Spirit, interacting with mind,
integrated with machine,
flowing through fingertips touched to keys, popping into appearance as text,
turned out into the physical realm coded by binary
to be bounced back into textual visualization
for other integrated mind machine participants:
Poetry pouring out as binary code.

Goodbye to Gaia.com

The website Gaia.com is shutting down. It began as a site called Zaadz, which is Dutch for "seeds," and an honorable idea of being a community and network site for spiritual, progressive, and artistic minded people. It still seems to be pretty active today, the reason for the site closing being noted by the owner as the "current economic conditions." I really enjoyed the site initially- I had a few friends that signed on at the beginning too, there were some good questions posed for website discussion, and I was able to reconnect with old friends from the Rime Buddhist Center. One of my favorite things about Gaia was the tag names underneath the members' given names. They read things like, "wakingdreamer," "~SmAsHInG dUaLiTy~," "Tantric YoginiShaman," and "Post Metaphysical Punk." I think that many of these names pointed to individuals' true higher aspirations and some were even trans-religious, combining practices such as Yoga and Shamanism, Buddhism and Taoism, which demonstrates the zeitgeist of people looking to integrate spiritual practices together to form an even larger picture of what God and Spirit means. Another highlight on the site was my friend Michael Garfield's page and blog, containing essays on topics like Cymatics (the study of the visual patterns that sonic vibrations form on surfaces and in three-dimentional objects) and the Rosslyn Chapel, Integral Art, and the classical minimalist composer Arvo Part. I think that all of these essays and more will still be able to be checked out on Michael's myspace page: myspace.com/michaelgarfield. And, from my humble Gaia page, I've archived my only blog entry, about the death of Bob Nash, the last connection to the Beat Generation that flourished in Big Sur. He died about two weeks and two years ago.

And with this, goodbye Gaia, glad to meet you.

A Beautiful Beat Poet Passes On

Posted on Mar 6th, 2008 by Chris

Hello friends,

Somehow I came across this lady's online journal entry with her personal account of the death of Bob Nash, "the last connection to the Beat Generation that flourished in Big Sur and the Carmel Valley after WWII." This lady, Susie Bright, and her friends carried Bob's body, craddled in sheets and tucked in with rosemary, up a hill from his residence to the road to meet the man from the mortuary. Here is a link to the article; the photos are incredible: http://susiebright.blogs.com/
And here is a poem:

Upon Meeting Bob Nash, 1964 by Ric Masten

one wonders
about an eccentric
content to live and work
in the claustrophobic confines
of a tiny camper shell
truckless
perched on flimsy redwood piers
and in terrain so enormous
distance is measured
in light years

the word
on Partington Ridge is vertical
horizontal
only on warm summer evenings
sprawled in the dry grass
mesmerized
by a towering uncloaked sky
hushed by the size of it all
this
while at my elbow
a monkish little guy
talks my leg off
piling the verbiage up
until there isn’t
nor will there ever be
a crock
large enough to contain it all

of course

the same thing can be said
about the human heart
and love
which gets us to the place
where Bob lets us see his art
pen and inks
so minimal and microscopic
they might be easily ignored
but in the right light
if you focus
the sparseness and simplicity
takes you aboard
until you find yourself
in league with molecules
closer to zero
than you have ever been before

lines as fine as these
can only be drawn
by someone who knows
precisely
how many angels can dance
on the head of a pin
and realizing this
one wonders

Peace and Love Everywhere,

Chris