radical druid

Just because you can read the map,
have bought travelogues and visitor guides
to the well-preserved brick-lined avenues
of tradition and ritual,

and believe you know which way is north,
doesn’t mean you know a thing about the terrain,
the weather, the likely hazards on the road,
the speed traps that lie in wait for unwary travelers.

Just think: what good is a description of a place
already right here and now,
beneath your feet, underneath your fingertips,
on the edge of your seat and the tip of your tongue?

How will you get there?

Those gurus, teachers and intrepid explorers
who have gone before:
how beautifully they describe what you’ll find there.
How is that possible?

How do you know you have arrived?
You are just a pill of salt
dropped off the end of the boat
unceremoniously plopped in the ocean;
your feet are melting, little one,
into the surf from whence all comes:
wave, crest, trough, and spray
touching all things with no edges.

It’s all so much talk, this discussion of other worlds,
of universes and devas, gods and monsters.
If everything is simply an arbitrary convention of reference,
who is teaching?

What is the lesson?

Once the schoolhouse has burnt to the ground,
do we still need our notes
to pass the exam?

If you struggle, remember this:
everything is an open book test.
You just must be present to win.

19 AUG 2026

© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

Somewhere a song of victory is waiting
for someone brave enough to write it down,
once they slip past the barricades downtown
where both sides are engaged in pointless hating.

Until such time, what good is celebrating?
Such tunes will just distract us as we drown,
and occupy the mourners gathered round,
licking their lips. They are salivating.

© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

As Danny Kaye asked in a fabulous number from White Christmas: “The theater, the theater, what happened to the theater? We can no longer call it dance, we call it choreography!”

If life is in fact nothing more than musical theater (and I can hear now the strident booing from the box seats, suggesting that the ideas of “mere” and “musical theater” were of such diametrically opposed stuff as to fill a chasm of disbelief so vast it would out span the 84000 kingdoms. Or some other outlandishly ordained measure of meritorious measurement), I repeat, and perhaps clarify if all life IS musical theater, then how can we communicate anything at all across an endless void if our longest single utterance is limited to 255 characters?

See above for perfect example of why social media length restrictions are a good idea. LOL.

15 AUG 2026

© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

I don’t need to hold the whole moon.

I’m the pond.
I am the dewdrop.

A reflection is more than enough.

Let me worry about holding a whole satellite
once I’ve reached the ocean.

Then the moon and I will be in sync, anyway.

I’m good with that.

11 AUG 2026

© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

Nobody ever shouts out the answer.
It’s that kind of world, but it’s not that kind of answer.

You see, the answer is substance, not style.
It’s the main program, not the advertisements
strewn in between pithy segments,
designed to lure you into a false sense of incompleteness,
convincing you that You are the set of all sets
not included in the set of all sets.

But the reason you’re watching
is not to be entertained.
You’re not here for a baby sitter,
an evangelical experience,
or a quick dopamine fix.

This is not that kind of program.

If you are sleeping, no one can awaken you.
They may shout in your ear,
shake your shoulders until your teeth rattle,
tickle your sides until you pee.
But that does not mean you are awake.

You can’t just open your eyes.

It’s not that kind of answer.

But it is that kind of world, right?
We all want a quick fix, an easy A,
a hack to enlightenment
that won’t use up too much memory
or more than five minutes a day.

Is that the kind of question you want to ask?

You’re not that kind of you.

11 AUG 2026

© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

God. Goddess. Universe. Life Force. Prana. The Absolute. Reality. Brahma. Beauty. Truth. Time-Space. The Void. Any of those oft capitalized attempts at assigning a definite label to an infinite indefinite. Borrow one from another language; it still doesn’t quite capture something you can’t contain, identify, prove, or physically touch.

I wish there was a word more useful, less loaded with pretense and individual meaning (or lack of meaning to be honest) and a little more ACTUALLY universal instead of implied and generally thought to be universal.

It absolutely should NOT be a name. Let’s start with that. That gives it form. It is formless. It doesn’t need a personality. It IS all personality. Everyone you’ve ever known, met, heard of, or read about. Plus you, too. Of course, if you knew that, we wouldn’t need a new word, would we?

And we spend far too much humanizing animals, anthro-morphing the world into our own image. But that only works if we are gods, right, and with so many insisting on a great separation between the Creator and the Created, between breath and dust, me and That, us and them, earth and heaven.

So, no visual representations either. Because they’re just way too culturally biased, aren’t they?

Absolutely stupid to use an existing word, like “it”. Calling a thing It is the same as calling it “Thing”. Negative.

Where does that leave us? Can’t use that word, either. “Us” is far too volatile a term. It changes meaning with the mood, weather, time of day, and latest meal. Who could possibly define that?

I’d tell you what the word is, but then I’d have to kill you. Or you would have to kill me.

Because at that point, there would only be one of us.

Whose name would we take?

I love weddings.

07 AUG 2026

© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

There is so much to say,
but I don’t have the words.
If I could explain the way it seems to me,
I’m not sure you could hear it.

That’s OK. You need to listen to your own voice,
the one that talks to you
when you’ve stopped talking,
when your mind takes a minute
in that space between breath
to sink back into the ocean
from the crest of the wave
you think is what makes up the entire sea
because it’s got your face on it.

So much to say.
So little time.
What a joke. There’s all of everything.

Give up what you think is freedom.
That word is just another prison.

07 AUG 2026

© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.