giraffe in central park

New York city, on the edges of central 72nd Ave and Central Park.
She is sitting on the bench next to him; her dark hair pulled back from her Indian freckled face - her eyes are the color of a jungle canopy, challenging and brave like a wild horse. They are sitting so close, that their fingers touch every few seconds - her soft skin is infinitely pale in comparison to his sun-soaked roughness. Their eyes meet and stay. Their laughs are genuine, their smiles full, their conversations like deep blue oceans. They sit and watch the world wander before their eyes - carelessly, effortlessly. He looks into her face, and she stares back. Their bodies are entirely comfortable with each other. A passerby would assume they are the most intimate of friends.
For eleven minutes they have known of each other.


in this moment, life flows perfectly. unpressed, unforced, un-pursued - it opens perfectly before us. We have been alive since the beginning of earth - the sons and daughters of eternal energy. Living in a constant state of transition, never ending, never completed - we find pieces of our past lives in the most subtle places; deja vu of the ancient stories we once were part of. We have friends and lovers from lives lived as a waterfall and lives lived in the shape of a circle, and lives lived as the growl of a lion.
So much energy that has existed and always existed; is it too much to believe that we knew each other in a different time.. as different beings? I find that there are no boundaries between what we were, who we are, and what we are able to become. Their are moments when a voice fills our ears so perfectly, that we are certain we have known that person for all of time - is it possible that is true?

A beautiful giraffe and a wild tiger find each other in Central Park - for a few precious hours they are reunited; recounting adventures in Africa that neither of them remember.



(Andrew Tipton)

move me

These are the days that we wait lifetimes for.
My fingers wrap around the clew, the heavy sail rubs against the back of my hand.. reminding me that we are flowing, swimming in the motion of the space between wind and water.
My bare chest feels the shadows of passing clouds; my eyes are closed, and I see blue and green spots. Laying on my back, melting into the cabin, I spread my arms out and let sunbeams stroke my stomach, my neck and my cheeks. From a million miles away, I feel sunbeams. Astonishing. Today is astonishing.
The world turns beneath us, our boat changes course but it is the earth that shifts to accommodate. Wild islands slip by like stealthy jaguars.. I wish suddenly to be able to swim this fast - faster even; to swim to one of the islands, to watch this beautiful boat from a distance. I would climb a tree and shout, "That is the most beautiful boat I have ever seen!". I would swim back, climb aboard dripping wet, and then sink into the skirts of the sails, drown myself in the roughness and the honesty of their grace.
Green and blue spots. Eyes tight shut.
How I love being free of all thought. Free of the thoughts that bring me peace, and the thoughts that take away doubt; free of the thoughts that abuse my soul, and free from the thoughts that own my paths. Green and blue become my only occupation, and quite possibly all that will ever matter for the rest of this moment.
Move me.
I want to feel it happening. Motion.
move me.
Thoughtlessly adrift we roam the seas of emptiness - the sort that is perfect in every way. we don't experience life until we absolutely have our eyes tightly shut.. Every pair of eyes.. the ones on our young faces, the ones that see the past, the ones that see the future, the ones that see our fear, the ones that see our happiness.
Eyes tight shut; sifting out the mayhem, erasing the reasons to be anywhere else. There is nowhere else to be.

The sail flutters.
I open one eye, pick up a slice of juicy watermelon and stick it into my mouth. My eyes are closed again.
These are the days that we wait lifetimes for.





(Andrew Tipton)

Sink Like a Big Rock in a Deep Lake

Splash.
the first rush of water pours into every pore of your skin, and you realize that you finally taste the coolness of a place that you have always longed to be.
This is sinking.
This is sinking through the depths of a night that has always belonged to you; losing your grasp on a reality that doesn't exist; A rock doesn't sink straight down, it moves between the edges of sideways - slowly, indulgently. Tonight is what you make of it, what you say it will be; it is slow, deliberate, unhurried, honest, subtle, boundless.
Here, shiny white horses weigh as much as political victories, your glass of wine holds the oceans of the planet, and honest whispers enter your ears and meander all the way to your soul - stirring, loud as cannons.
We lay in silence as gentle hands prepare farm-grown vegetables.
Tibetan prayer flags and the explosions of bubbles.
Time is meaningless.
My brothers, we have found each others' breathe! We have discovered the forgotten humanity of our own faces. You sit beside me on the edge of a bed, or perhaps the edge of a mountain and we wonder out loud about the intricacies of our own beauty.
Sink. Sinking. Sinking.
Like big rocks in a deep lake.
We are already deeper, our senselessness dissolving.
Your bare fingers hold a slice of tomato; you put it into your mouth and satisfaction sweeps along the curves of your face like a summer rain. From across the table, you are wonderful to look at - you make me glad for vision. Your smile makes me glad to be alive.
Language dissolves into sounds, sounds dissolve into breathing, breathing dissolves into everything; our breathes sound like the wind in Antarctica. We breathe in so much oxygen that it hurts - for an instant our minds remember our precious lungs.
Adventure owns us, freedom is glorious.
We are most awesome as big rocks lying on the dark, mysterious floor of a deep lake.
Complete. Completely lost; completely found.







(Andrew Tipton)

Knife's Edge

I trust the biggest rock because it is big. How much bigger is the universe? The heavens? My own heart?
Beautiful, even the thought of water, the momentum, the coldness, the shimmering expansiveness of our own imaginations - beautiful.
Liquid blue lagoon if I could bathe in you right now, I would long dissolve into your majesty and expand into every corner of your shape.
Tickle my neck ye brave fly... make the hairs on my back stand up and make the pores of my flesh release toxin & love alike.
Brave black fly, your courage and spirit of adventure is ironically unbeknownst to you yourslef. Fly free, explore my body, take with you great tidings of peace - ballads of freedom. We could become water, the pool of substance and refreshment, drowning in ourselves because we are more than we believe. Running down mountains, splashing across one anothers lips, slipping through the cracks in our imaginations, flowing, echoing into places that long for bewilderment...