And I tell you, when you get there – it doesn’t flash like a light, no backlit Hollywood hero on horseback. It mellows in quickly and you feel it, you know? It’s, uh, it’s…well anyway. There’s nothing more important than knowing you can – than knowing what it’s like to give from the WHOLE person you realize you are. You know it the moment you know yourself. Hm. And however much magical beer you – um – drink, if you sprinkle pepper on a rock, it still tastes like a rock… just more peppery.
So certain was I that plate tectonics was my guardian angel;
and why not, gravity has served me mercifully in the past.
I snuck behind her back to do battle with the daemons that she didn’t see hiding behind her angels.
Deep dumb blinking of trauma all around me.
Where the wounded go for comfort, to ruminate and heal, their “state of existence”
I’m not particularly dogmatic…I hybridize everything.
…and then I choose to spend a month writing on a beach.
For some reason, quality is an undertone felt more than seen. And we behave in undertones.
Jovial languages westernized for straight men. His was a plan to vanquish the human trade industry…I was a ploy. I don’t speak Chinese. But anyway, I have spent just a little time in a lot of places I didn’t want to go
and I kept quiet; there is no sense rushing a world war, right?
My grandparents were incredibly kind and generous. They have passed – dead – dead for their good deeds. They were cooks with equity in the casserole…
Standing before a great mountain skirted lake, steaming for photographers, is just a reminder of a perfect place for the fulcrum of Nirvana; one that balances the condition of living responsibly and loving uncontrollably.
I really don’t know anything at all actually!
Yes, three words in our feeble attempt to bottle the jeanie only seem to whisk it along as the world grows more tender beneath our feet.
Like philosophy seeks to destroy itself, I want a gold dipped metaphor for why NOT to write.
Your love found me, as if two suns rose from the east and west at the same time. Where their rays met would be indistinguishable, and why even understand it. What we feel in touch is not skin and when we kiss it is not your lips meeting mine; it is not our bodies intertwined, nor mere pulsing words landing softly in our ears…it is not the nostalgic aroma, or the groaning floorboards beneath our ambling feet. None of this, for what meets at the nexus is the soulful intent of a love that traces back to the timeless depths of your being – a touch that connects an infinite past to an infinite future. This which we hold dearly, is the untamed wind between us, inhaled in a moment as a prelude to a kiss –exchanged in the warm home of the others heart, and released anew in an effervescing exhale as our lips part. Embraced, our spirits slowly wrestle along the frontiers of unexplored human wilderness; twisting in confluence like eddies playing on the surface of a still night lake; braiding banyan vines cling gently to quell our shivering…our words are sighs of relinquishment to the desperation of loves inexpressible exclamations resonating within caverns of expectation, filled with pristine imaginings.
Interlude: As We Go
Love is where we go, when we go, how we go and why we go…it’s anguish and rejoice in a timeless dance, spiraling out lingering memories that rain nourishment on as many weeds as colored flowers. And our lives in this way, are forever sweetly tending to the astounding meaning of subtle acts. There in a garden we’ll pull the weeds to feed the soil which gives them life and till the dirt that receives the rain to quench the roots. And as dusk settles in, we’ll sift the flower bed; and we’ll build a breathtaking path of byzantine patterns from the extracted cobbles of an inconvenient past set in mortar mixed from a forever blooming love.
Postlude: As We Part
That when you feel the cold steel of disquiet awkwardness and your breath has temporarily seized – I will draw in a breath to fill us both up. …That when words fail you, I will solemnly circle in the swirling eddies of your soul and pluck soft petals of thought as parchment and scribe your poetry with many hues of understanding and kindness. If your heart is weary and teetering in confusion, I promise to kiss the arcing sun and moon so that as they trade their places through cycles of the days and nights, you are left with both waking and lullaby dreams. If the circling voices are deafeningly loud or silence becomes your enemy, I will take my post close by your side as your compassionate and soothing warrior, your agile shark…to stir gentle notes on melodies until a beautiful undulating dolphin shoots the waves over sky and moon.
The shelter within, is affixed with all you need to search and restore life, tended by the passion of your own true love, with green thatches to catch and divert the rain and smooth cobbles to line the path for when you are ready to take to the road again.
Destiny worries not for you, you should not worry destiny. It does not stand in the distance and wait for you, you should spring headlong onto its runner of endless moments and create the trail of your art. Go, and leave behind you the signs of all your happiness and I will find you. And if you find yourself having little to leave behind for me to follow, then look up my precious love, because I’m standing right here before you. Take my hand, I have enough signs to cast for both of us.
Refrain and Fade Out:
For all the love in the world you need
can be fit on the tip of a pin…
as vast as the bounty of earth, wind and sea,
it will sooner get under your skin.
 |
| Haecceity |
it is what is of what — it is that of what is
We always break it down to surrendering to our destiny, be that our compulsions to roll with its uncertain and vicarious plan for ALL of us – OR, in haecceity, to enthusiastically grab up our chattels and trek on in vigilance toward a quite specific future moment held firmly in our INDIVIDUAL perceptions. It would seem that we cannot surrender to destiny, but to only our choices. And for others, perhaps it’s just a bittersweet surrender to numb ourselves to the zeal of an evangelist, who’s destiny is to align toward themselves everything their path, like iron filings to a passing magnet. But then again, aren’t our choices made from the same “stuff” of destiny.
There are infinite directions taken by infinite souls, each an individual ray of light emanating from the very center of a large translucent glass sphere; each inevitably intersects the glass at an infinite number of unique locations, in boundless patterns. The path within the sphere is variegated, streaked with diversity – a bittersweet chaos – the collective quiddity of life. The surface is a layer of self-other revelation, one encased future after another; the universe an atom. We leap like electrons to the next outer shell of realization…seeking stability, answers, or just engagement. And it is among those that travel farthest from the nucleus, those with the most energy, that best characterize their reactions with the world around them. It is ironic, yet fitting, that destiny seems to loosen it’s grip on us the further we journey from it’s center; slipping “…the surly bonds of earth…” (no, not Ronald Reagan, but John Gillespie Magee’s poem, “High Flight.” Note that pilot officer Magee was killed in a midair collision 3 months after writing this, he was only 19 when he died. His poems were inspired by his only true and unrequited love for Elinor Lyon with whom he remained friends…he wrote of her, but chose another deeper relationship… but that is another subject altogether).
From my dinner table by the window I watched the ambling and noisy passerby’s – and I became deluded by my own idea that happiness is an infrequent preoccupation of life, a proverbial “comma” to a long-winded sentence; a quick paradise of dust kicked up by God stepping through the desert. I thought how a moment of happiness seems to pass so quickly and yet, how our disappointments seem to echo through deep valleys of consciousness. As life progresses there is this proclivity to toil with the recollection of our sadness, leaving us amidst a talus of strife. I asked myself, could it be that the altar of happiness is built on the ruins of sorrow? That the happiness we deserve is measured by the high mark of our grief – and oh how we labor the years to build those layers…
I sat still in the crossfire of clanking from silverware on china. I was peering out into the street through the window, compelled by the din of diners and their thick and expanding cacophony of uncertainty. I leaned closer to the glass, and with bleached out emotion, looked up at the clouds drifting en echelon. I can still make out their blushing in the moonlight, disappearing behind tall building rooftops. Mesmerizing…one wave after the other, lost.
There in the restaurant, something odd began to happen. A break in the mottled night parade of clouds reveals a chorus of stars fading into view until such clarity. Each winks in the implicit silence of heaven and the voices around me begin to rescind. All presence in the room dissipates into the shadows and my eyes fill with starlight as I clench the captains wheel. I could tell that life was about to deliver me into another moment of certainty in an ocean of doubt and I could feel my ship list in the wake while waves leap through the stanchions. Where is my beacon in this night – and how could I be lost in the promise of certainty at a moment like this. Holding fast, the winds whip the sheets and whistle through the halyards; all the while the stars wink on. I was at sea. The darkness hurling everything mystery could offer, I deflected peril with rationale, fought one fear with another greater fear. I leaned forward on the wheel, turning the bow into the wind – keeping my knees slightly bent for balance. The ocean heaves in slow motion like the rising and falling chest of Neptune deeply dreaming. The clanking of swivels and bolt-snaps against the mast tap out a persistent “mayday, mayday” – its slapdash beat is a sweet companion but I’m certain no one hears it but me. And I begin to wish for company even more so than for the seas to calm.
I’m shaking while the ships clamoring rises in chaos – there is no chance she’ll capsize I hear an imaginary voice say. I holler back, “I know! I know!” With my eyes clenched shut to the guiding stars, I pray fiercely as my own self-induced darkness starts to take it’s toll on my spirit. And amidst the rush I begin to make out the faint pulse of the dining room and their murmurs growling through the gusts. I can no longer bear it and my eyes and hands spring open, the wheel slips from my grip and spins furiously, the ship comes about quickly, and the room lurches. I shudder back to reality at the sound of a window rattling – a group of kids run off laughing, they were pounding on it to stir my attention. I was uncertain where I’d been and for how long.
Wincing my eyes to bring the street lamps into focus, I could almost hear their hum of electricity. From across the street, I could feel the amber glow coming from the inside the window at Café Montserrat. I’d returned. I‘d returned. I was here in the “now” with this elusive sense of enlightenment only hinted at by subtle signs of tiny flames lit and rising within my heart. And at that moment, “certainty” happened. Looking out, I saw her, in the window of the café, looking back at me. Transfixed in the moment, her eyes had been locked on mine, twin-cased stars glimmering through deep mahogany brown. In that moment, destiny unraveled in 15 meters and a split second. Gazing through the transparency of the pedestrians passing between our windows, we recognized each other through our journey and I looked up at the stars and then back to see her doing the same – and her eyes returned to mine, filled with tears, that fell as our smiles quivered like crying and laughing all at once.
…For some the meaning of life is spoken in silence over dinner plates… it’s purpose, clinked into realization between toasting wine glasses. For others, it is to see deeply into our present and to sail the pulsing stars, to find beauty in momentum and embrace our presence in the window to the lives of others. Wherever we are heading, is kindly guided by the certainty of where we are now.
Humans continue to evolve and adapt physiologically over the course of evolutionary history, if you subscribe to that, but I am certain we are also evolving as emoting, bleating, impassioned, conscious, aware minds. And while over thousand generations it is impossible to see the retraction of the human tail to the useless coccyx, it seems I am witnessing the complete transformation of human psyche and metaphysics in my brief lifetime…there is an acceleration here and it disturbs me and enthralls me at the same time. Our metaphysical senses are expanding so much that, we are diluting the intensity…or at best “losing the bead” of focus…like attention deficit syndrome….we now have emotional deficit syndrome.
Perhaps this isn’t cataclysmic evolution – perhaps it’s been equally subtle as the evolution from ape to upright homo erectus. Perhaps social media via pervasive internet connectivity – the world wide web – may simply bring to the surface something that has always been there….passion. But I’m convinced that technology is as much a part of natural evolution as the mutation to an opposable thumb. In this analogy, it would stand to reason that there is an acceleration. I don’t recall when it changed…. but it has. The fact that we are so “impassioned” to throw a bomb or sanction against anyone who bombs or sanctions another is so “broadcasted.” We’ve lost touch with the importance of secluded microcosms – social media and broadcast news is so ubiquitous that I am now tempering my perceptions, values, emotions, and passions against a status quo that represents the “averaging” of every culture known to man. I’m aware of only one macrocosm now – and I beat my chest proudly at my new found “world citizenship.” We are all indeed ONE human race…but I guess I didn’t know the significance of that that until now. Now the death of a friends grandfather, mother, wife can be eclipsed by my worldly vision of a middle eastern man running out of his bombed out home with his mortally wounded child in his arms…or a dead giraffe. I miss my microcosm of human condition – I miss the “broadcasted” things that remind me of my grandfather or my childhood and the people in it. They are still alive – and if one were running out of his devastated home with an injured daughter in his arms – it would still remind me of the middle eastern man…and how the world macrocosm is so filled with horror and sorrow. I even share in the thrill of the kill of a morally deficient terrorist running across his bedroom more than I do in the image of my son running down the third base line for a heralding slide.
I still remember leaving my bike unlocked in my own little neighborhood…for days. I remember the death of friends being earth shattering events that changed the very fabric of that neighborhood…not a wrinkle in the fabric…but a new sheen. Now – I am aware of the strangeness of people with whom I know more of emotionally than I know otherwise…we bare our souls on Facebook so that anyone could see and share, but we cannot trust a stranger to watch our book bag while we run to the restroom.
Where are you with your blessed awareness…have you challenged it. Have you held it with reverence and delicacy – as if it had a hair trigger. I am a weighted down in the summer heat this evening – dining and drinking alfresco. Filtering out these unfamiliar but intensely “sensed” surroundings to allow the death of a friends wife, a friends mother, a friends grandfather to orbit around me…I want to go home, I want my children to understand “home” and I want to block their ears and eyes to all this nonsense…to turn their intense and electronically enabled awareness inward. God lives in my home town – he lives in this country…he may have a cousin in Egypt and to people in Egypt, God has a cousin here – it doesn’t much matter to me. The human condition is to be aware, but awareness is compassion…
Cheap white wine and Oreos
