It doesn't interest me what you do for a living;
I want to know what you ache for.
It doesn't interest me how old you are;
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of life.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still shout at the edges of a lake, river, or mountain, "Yes, I am a warrior poet."
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have;
I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for someone you love.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and truly like the company you keep, in the empty moments of your life, and still remember me.
LIve...more than your neighbors.
Unleash yourself upon the world and go places
Go now....giggle...no....laugh
And bark at the moon like the wild dog that you are
Understand that this is not a dress rehearsal.....this is it......your life
Face your fears and live your dreams
Take it all in....yes....every chance you get......come close
And by all means...whatever you do.....get in on film.

Your Friend,
Blazeman,
The ALS Warrior Poet
---written by Jon Blais, 34-year-old survivor with Lou Gehrig's Disease, just prior to competing in - and finishing - 2005 Ironman Hawaii

(from the New York Times)

New Year's Eve

At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year. Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet, ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.

There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year's Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.

It's worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.

It's not that time isn't passing or that the night doesn't show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.

I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn't so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that's like.

I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG

It has been ages since I last posted a blog entry.  In the past many weeks I have experienced great achievement and great loss, jolting heart break and glowing warmth of love, optimism and hopelessness.  In this short period of time in Portland as well as Boston, Santa Barbara, Denver, New York, Phoenix, Washington, DC., Las Vegas and San Diego... I have seen reflected back to me a new version of Matt Gerber.  A quieter, wiser, more determined, patience, loving and compassionate Matt Gerber.  It was a year of growth for me.

I wanted to share this poem, as I often do, that spoke to me about our lives and about time:

Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen .. poem begin --> Poem: "Testament" by Hayden Carruth, from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995. © Copper Canyon Press, 1996. (buy now)

Testament

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away — I'm sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I've made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can't go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow's mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I'm no financier doing
the world's great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

Top 5 Facts for this Name:

---

1. 30% of the letters are vowels. Of one million first and last names we looked at, 79.9% have a higher vowel make-up. This means you are modestly envoweled.
2. In ASCII binary it is... 01001101 01100001 01110100 01110100 00100000 01000111 01100101 01110010 01100010 01100101 01110010
3. Backwards, it is Ttam Rebreg... nice ring to it, huh?
4. In Pig Latin, it is Attmay Erbergay.

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1. Modestly envoweled
2. Ttam Rebreg backwards
3. Attmay Erbergay in Pig Latin
4. 01001101 01100001 01110100 01110100 00100000 01000111 01100101 01110010 01100010 01100101 01110010 in binary code?

See more at www.IsThisYour.Name" }, {button:false}); //Output your customized button document&183;write('Like these 5 facts? Share them!'); //Tie customized button to ShareThis button functionality. var element1 = document&183;getElementById("share1"); object1.attachButton(element1); ..>

Name Origin and Meaning:

---

Forename:
Meaning: Gift from God

3 Things You Didn't Know:

---

1. Your personal power animal is the Horned Lizard
2. Your 'Numerology' number is 1. If it wasn't bulls**t, it would mean that you are ambitious, independent, and self-sufficient. Although you are generally happy, loving, dynamic and charismatic, you can sometimes be egotistical, selfish and melodramatic.
3. According to the US Census Bureau°, 0.038% of US residents have the first name 'Matt' and 0.0068% have the surname 'Gerber'. The US has around 300 million residents, so we guesstimate there are 8 Americans who go by the name 'Matt Gerber'.

Hosted By: Matt Gerber
When: Friday Sep 26, 2008
at 4:00 PM
Where Hilton - Executive Tower
6th & Salmon
Portland, OR 97202
United States
Description:
Matt Gerber

Click here to see agenda and registration information.

..tr>..table>

The Way Men Crack II Recently, I have been in Montana, a place that lives up to the nearly mythical proportions I had envisioned before arriving for the first time this week.  I have enjoyed lots of food and drink, hours upon hours of exploring the wilderness, and some much needed time for reflecting and thinking.  My life is going through a number of transitions right now and I was reminded of a poem that speaks to this state of change.  A line about how "they (men) grow younger and younger" is particularly significant before there have been moments where I have reflected on recent events and felt I was about 5-yrs-old.  I posted the poem below on my blog about eight months ago but I related to it in a very different way today, perhaps you will too. - MG Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen .. poem begin --> Poem: "I Love the Way Men Crack" by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love, Vol. 1. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002. (buy now) I Love the Way Men Crack I love the way men crack open when their wives leave them, their sheaths curling back like the split shells of roasted chestnuts, exposing the sweet creamy meat. They call you and unburden their hearts the way a woman takes off her jewels, the heavy pendant earrings, the stiff lace gown and corset, and slips into a loose kimono. It's like you've both had a couple shots of really good scotch and snow is falling in the cone of light under the street lamp— large slow flakes that float down in the amber glow. They tell you all the pain pressed into their flat chests, their disappointed penises, their empty hands. As they sift through the betrayals and regrets, their shocked realization of how hard they tried, the way they shouldered the yoke with such stupid good faith— they grow younger and younger. They cry with the unselfconciousness of children. When they hug you, they cling. Like someone who's needed glasses for a long time— and finally got them-they look around just for the pleasure of it: the detail, the sharp edges of what the world has to offer. And when they fall in love again, it only gets better. Their hearts are stuffed full as éclairs and the custard oozes out at a touch. They love her, they love you, they love everyone. They drag out all the musty sorrows and joys from the basement where they've been shoved with mitts and coin collections. They tell you things they've never told anyone. Fresh from loving her, they come glowing like souls slipping into the bodies of babies about to be born. Then a year goes by. Or two. Like broken bones, they knit back together. They grow like grass and bushes and trees after a forest fire, covering the seared earth. They landscape the whole thing, plant like mad and spend every weekend watering and weeding.

Currently listening: Citizen Cope By Citizen Cope Release date: 2002-01-29

Who wants to join me next year?  I'm actually serious. - Matt

13 are injured in Pamplona's running of the bulls

            Peter looked over the counter at me as he handed me my coffee.  "It sounds like things have been intense for you lately."  Peter is a friend and former coworker at Starbucks.  He was probably referring to a myriad of illusive remarks I have made either on my blog, display status or bulletins.  These messages alluded to tumultuous times in my life and rather than explaining it repeatedly; I thought a little general context might be helpful.

            First, I am not depressed nor am I in crisis.  In am in-process and this is where I want to be.  There was the smashing of the melons in the yard one rainy afternoon a few weeks ago.  That was a very unusual display of aggression for me and a healthy venting of some long-ignored frustrations.  By giving myself that permission to feel, I suddenly experienced in love and pain in a vibrancy that I have not known for many years.

            The essence of this journey is this: I am trying to become the most healthy, flawed person I can.  I have used a variety of process and tools to do this.  Art and writing have been key.  In writing fiction I can work out scenarios and come to conclusions to apply to me own life.  A sort of trial and error with the lives of my characters.  I, of course, still have plenty of trail and error in my own life.

            The Jon Keegan gallery that I have put up in my photos is a collection of his images that resonated with me for a variety of reason.  The text below each photo is a narrative that I wrote and it has little if anything to do with the original intent of the artwork.  In work with immigrant refugees from conflict regions and sites of natural disasters, a key part of therapy is helping them "complete their narrative."  That is to say, you help them see the traumatic event as a single chapter of their journey and that life can continue even after the most horrific of experiences.  Perhaps it was my narrative that I was writing when I wrote the captions for the Keegan photos.  All I know is that there is a profound symmetry between the story that is told there and the personal journey I am on.

            The bottom line is that life may be messy and difficult but that doesn't make it bad.  As a good friend shared with me the other night, "90% of life is maintenance."  For me, honestly looking at my beliefs, values and struggles is part of that maintenance.  I am trying to learn how to better embrace that and not escape.