You Can Call Me Baby

About six weeks ago I stopped smoking. Life has revolved around this point – waking, dreaming, laughing, screaming. And suddenly I’m not the person I thought I was. Wait, I simply don’t know who I am. Oh, it’s not so bad. When you don’t know who you are you don’t’ bicker with yourself so much, there’s not all this old baggage to address. I’m all newborn, covered with blood. Ten fingers, ten toes and a big mess you can call baby.

I’m in a rather menacing way. It’s fascinating. Dark thoughts at every turn. I don’t like it. However much I’d ceased liking who I was in that relationship with the addiction – well, I don’t care much for this girl either. On the ferry en route to San Francisco the other day, I thought about some essay I’d read here or there on mediation and prayer. The author contends that whether or not we consider ourselves religious folk and whether or not we think we pray – that we do – we pray and meditate all the time. The author urged us to be mindful of what our prayer rests on. Some people spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about money, material things, what others think of them (or what other’s aren’t thinking of them), etc. etc. So these are the kinds of things that might occupy our thoughts – which are our meditations and prayers.

Considering this unremembered author’s contentions I tried to be mindful. The bay, how beautiful the water, the sun glinting on patterns of waves in such and such a way to look like diamonds sparkling on something dark and mysterious and deep. The color of the hills surrounding San Quentin prison – electric green from the winter rains. The smell of salt and sea. The woman who asks for change on the Embarcadero – she has a lovely smile. I give her ten dollars. It’s what I would have spent on cigarettes that day – do I think for a second she is less worthy than that?

It’s all a fancy way of saying, go to a happy place. So I went to my happy place. I don’t mind saying that I have a bit of disdain that it’s a contrived place – not a natural place my thoughts and heart lands – not like it used to be. Or did it?

I keep trying to remember the wisdom in that thing that Homer Simpson said… Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen. It only goes to follow that it also takes two to speak the truth. Some days I feel like I’d have a real edge up on things if I were schizophrenic.

Namaste

It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

But yet I find I’m not afraid. Over the years I find myself accepting rather than mourning and seeking the life in things as opposed to the death in things. Death is the final chapter. It will come for all of us marking neither a success nor failure but merely an end to our stories. The questions we must ask ourselves – did we live well, did we die well and how do we define well?

Namaste is a Sanskrit word. I’ve heard it defined many ways. The one I like is, I bow to the divine within you. And I do. But I don’t. I don’t see or acknowledge the divine in everyone. Is this right, is this wrong?

I don’t like disappointment and I try to rebel against it rather than accept it. There was a great movie, The Third Man, written by Graham Greene. It’s a fabulous film, not only for its wonderful zither music but also for brilliant performances by Joseph Cotton and Orson Wells. Anyways, there is a character, Anna, who says, “just because you know more about someone, it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change how you feel about them.” But this isn’t and hasn’t been my experience. Knowing more does change things. Sometimes knowing more builds that wall that blocks my view to the divine.

And I embark upon the day in a quandary – where this brick has been placed in a wall to a nine year old child. I no longer see the child for the child, no longer see the divine within the child. What does it mean or say about me when I view the actions of a nine year old child morally reprehensible and unforgivable? How can a child be unforgivable?

The Harvest

I put things in order from A to Z, small to large, dust off the debris, rearrange, restack and organize – trying to impress some order on the chaos. When am I going to learn that trying to organize dust particles is futile? And here we are dust to dust. All it takes is a strong wind and we’re history.

I don’t have much time here. I don’t have much time to figure it all out. I call it eternity – but it’s not. It’s my forever, but it’s conscripted solely in my flesh. I’ve been granted this gift and I’ve abused it – or maybe I’ve just lived it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. If I’ve used it well, sometimes I think I should arrive at this moment with more, but I never really deliberate on what I mean by that. More what?

Come down here onto the earth and die by the weight of it. It’s so much more than sitting up there in the clouds pondering the heavens. There will be time for that later when we’re dead. We will come to know the spirit world soon enough, when our forms are better suited for that understanding. We weren’t given the gift of flesh in order to understand that world. We were sent here to understand this one rightly. Is speaks through each of us and this is what Is tells me.

Walk on the ground and carry the weight of creation rightly. The burden increases with every act, every deed, and when it comes to be too much we’re to do what Atlas does – to shrug. This is the burden of our harvest. This is the burden of the abundance of life. It’s called joy.

Every Violin

Isn’t every violin supposed to be yielding itself to my hearing?? Damn trees. Damn blades of grass. You mean they are not growing all around me with the recognition that I’m the gravitational center?? No, no, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be the center. I just want my corner, off to the side, out of the fray, outside the whirlwind chaos of everything.

I want time to slow down and I want crisp morning walks and a progression from one thing to the next that feels even vaguely like progress even if I don’t understand why, to what end, toward or away from what. I want my voice to be heard, my words appreciated. Yes, the problem is that I want a certain reverence that I neither want to work for or be terribly accountable to. That’s arrogant and unfulfilling all at once.

If I set wind to these words will it offer them the gravity to float away? My old therapist seemed to think so. There are too many words left undone, half spun, frayed and broken and the tapestry is unraveling as we sit here saying nothing.

I had a dream last night that I was a drummer. Yes. A drummer, of all things. New music, subtle and complicated rose and for the life of me I couldn’t feel the rhythm of it, could’t find the beat for the life of me. I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t who I thought I was. And in my waking I realize that I’m not.

Perhaps my anger is for what I’m not – not for what the rest of the world is or isn’t. And that sucks. And maybe all I’m trying to do now is deflect my disappointment in myself.

Do you think I’m having some kind of mid-life crisis? That’s a possibility, but it’s such a simple phrase that’s likely overused and abused. The term mid-life crisis feels like an excuse or a box to place angst in. Oh look, one more aspect of life to throw a few simple words on, since it’s just a phase somehow it’s not real life and it can be dismissed. I don’t think so. Not this time. That’s been part of the problem all along. Sometimes I feel like screaming at myself, “you’re entire life is not a phase to simply endure until you get to the other side of it.”

If I have a single obligation it’s to find, experience and express joy. That’s the goal of every single day and why do I have such a hard time accomplishing this mission? What’s the obstacle here even when there’s no apparent obstacles?? Why am I my own biggest road block to this?

Crazy

Sometimes I think I’m going crazy. Like today, for example, as I stood on the pier waiting for the ferry, sipping a blended iced mocha from Peats, and found myself counting, very quickly, in my head, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10… then starting over. I won’t say it felt idiot savantish, just idiotish. And I wondered how long I’d been doing that until I became fully conscious of it.

Or as I later boarded the ferry, only one of the two ramps was lowered and I imagined myself walking right up and off the raised ramp. And mostly I wondered what stopped me from doing this. What part of brain stopped me? Though my legs leadened as I reached the fork, momentarily. It’s not that any great harm would have befallen me had I walked up on the raised ramp – maybe a thirty foot fall at most, likely less, into the bay. Divers propel themselves from heights beyond this, nothing would have happened. Maybe I would have been banged up a bit by something on the fall, but it wouldn’t have been a mortal wound.

This morning there were black birds on the roof, trying to crack walnuts or something open with their beaks. Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. Peck, knock, peck. I walked outside and surveyed the roof. “Hey you,” I conveyed to the birds in an agitated tone without raising my voice too much, “hey you, knock that off. Stop it.”

Growing Up

I’m watching the paraffin bubbles rise in the lava lamp. The best phase of a lava lamp is when everything starts to melt and rise like a reverse drip sand castle or whatever those stalagmite thingies are you see when you’re spelunking.

Opening Your Eyes and Breathing

Secret is curled on the sofa in a pink afghan knit by my grandmother’s hands. Her white paws stretch against the air like a cat’s while she sleeps. I’m left with memories of sea lions playing in the surf, towering Eucalyptus trees with their peeling green bark and the damp mossy smell of Redwoods in Samuel P Taylor Park.

This is home. It’s a peaceful place where the outside meets the inside with seamless boundaries. The beauty is so effortless. It’s as though the environment itself conspires that one sees what is bountiful and delectable in everything. It takes no great imagination, no hours of meditation, no creative genius – it’s as easy as opening your eyes and breathing. It’s all here and there’s nothing to want for – not today, not right now.