departures.

I came rolling in from the rain like a thundercloud. I had been floating around the city like a shadow, Astral Weeks rolling through my head like a swift green river. I was pushing myself toward something that loomed ahead like a stop sign, or maybe just a fork in the road. I started seeing every day as an arrival into some distant land, some future I had glimpsed but somehow misinterpreted.

Sometimes, things change. Your path is redirected. What is hard about the process is not revisiting the dirt you had already passed over, or even finding your way, really- it’s the knowledge that with each step you take, you are walking into a future different than the one you had envisioned, even hoped for. Your arrival into the new land may be stunted, held up by the heartbreaking disillusionment that often accompanies your departure from the old path. You have to realize that this is ok; you will be forgiven for stumbling.

I had wanted everything to add up, I had suffered under the impression that there was only one honest game in town. Everything had been leveling out like a floodplain, but now it appeared the waters would rage once again. Everything was up for grabs, swallowed and carried away by the rising tide. I put on my bomber jacket and stumbled out to my truck- once, twice, a hundred times. It took on a sort of elemental feel. I was dead to everything except momentum. Would this become my life? It was hard to say.

Life is a series of arrivals and departures, of going in one doorway only to find yourself at the threshold of another. Sorrow and joy are, in the end, only the jingling of keys in a restless hand. There is only the timeless motion of the tides to consider, the slow and steady revolution of the planet, the shifting sands in the ever-growing deserts. Life is vast, and our hearts should be open when we travel through it. Our departures mark our time in this place like mile-posts on the highway. It is what happens in between that matters, that should be remembered…and carried with us into our next arrival, but only if we can see it as something other than a burden.

Time seemed to pass. Sleep came in patches, marked by sorrowful (yet painfully vivid) dreams. The need to take a drink every night vanished mysteriously into the wind. I laughed at jokes, some of them actually funny. Astral Weeks played on, venturing into the slipstream, leaving me conquered in a car seat way up on Cypress Avenue. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, the wave broke. The waters had receded. The roads were clear, and my hour of departure was at hand.

the fitful dream of a greater awakening.

Snow covers the ground in every direction, and the moon is obscured. It is hard to feel natural in such an environment. You put your hands in your pockets, you take them out again- every gesture feels like an ultimatum. For those of us wary of decision making, it is chiefly a time of disquiet. But this is what we do. Life is a river and it just rolls on, makings its way to the sea.

Somewhere, someone is running the numbers- and it has become clear that I just don’t figure. This has never been a surprise. This has always been a zero-sum game as far as I am concerned, and there is no use in pretending otherwise. The world keeps revolving, and I keep doing what I do best. The only thing that changes is the way the pieces add up at the end of the day.

The leaves are all buried deep underneath the snow, and as strange as it seems, I am content. I keep moving through these situations like a sharp-edged knife. Public perception be damned- I am alive and connecting with everything around me like a tree in a lightning storm. If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it, the vibrations still shake the ground like a glacier crumbling into the sea. That is where I am right now, and there is nowhere to go but forward.

turbulence + its virtues.

He felt it looming all the while, like a train reverberating through a valley long since abandoned by decent people. The leaves covered the ground like a picnic blanket, and as usual he was preparing himself for those shining moments when his heart fell with the leaves, raged with the wind, chilled with the cold. He was baking turtle bones, in a sense, but nothing was coming up right. The tea leaves stared back at him like a sentry in a guard tower. It seems the future was as uncertain as ever.

So he took that sense of mystery and ran with it. There would be no reckoning, no long, dark night of the soul spent staring at an empty bottle of wine and counting the minutes. He was done with counting. He decided instead to burn, white hot through the fog, incandescent and alive, his heart beating with a purpose for once. He was tapping messages in code on the outer walls of a great awakening- of that much, he was sure.

the post-lonesome blues

“without mercy, man is like a beast.”

There was no bell tolling for him. Just the same, he felt a keen sense of detachment from whatever would be. There was a road he was heading down, but he couldn’t be bothered to stop and mark his bearings. Each night had become the sort where he faded away, into the background. He haunted conversations and barstools like he had all the time in the world. Everything was shadows and distance. He grew to like the silence in the later hours. This was his hour, when darkness reigned. No one had given him a map; and he was to leave soon for uncharted waters.

It rained the whole summer long, drowning everything but his sorrows. Those were left to better and more proactive solutions, like alcohol and the verse of Pablo Neruda.  At his age the alcohol was not as much a help as it had been in earlier, more carefree times; it was merely a way station in which he would find a little shelter from time to time. A bottle of wine became an old friend who visits only when needed, no more, no less.

He dreamed of cold, lonesome places. His people had come from the northernmost parts of the British Isles, and he imagined joining some company of spirits on some windswept cliff, waiting to be taken by the sea. He had just come out of a long season, one that seemed to have no end. Yet it had ended, had it not? He was free to love and be loved, to show mercy to those who needed it, to be a thinking-feeling-breathing human being with his own spot in the soil.

Day by day, he felt himself growing in love and wisdom. His heart unfolded and took in everything on some days; on others he was so disappointed by the world that he didn’t want to get out of bed. Such is life. But still he felt he was moving in the right direction. Jealousy and envy, pride and arrogance, they fell from him like leaves from a tree. The need to prove himself to others became the height of foolishness. He read the Diamond Sutra, he read Merton. He read Thich Nhat Hanh and vowed to cultivate mindfulness. He felt his kinship with others as tangibly as he might feel the rain on his face in the midst of a thunderstorm. He felt a flowering of compassion for the world and it’s inhabitants.

He was lonely, sure. The world is a lonesome place. There would be no escape from hurtful words, from harmful relationships. Sometimes the burden was heavy enough to provoke a flood of tears; other times it was so light the world just seemed brighter, more vividly arrayed. But this was the journey, and as he had promised himself and those he loved, it would unfold at its own speed.

excerpt.

“One should rather think of the fellow’s despair. Without Ninon, he lived for many years like flowers in a vase. His brain was clotted with sadness. His eyes became faucets and his heart was a hot iron brand lodged inside his chest. When his despair was calmed (for despair from love dies faster than a little coal oven, heh, heh), he was seen wandering from ravine to ravine, lifting each stone, diving into each waterfall looking for his Ninon. His abandoned hutch was losing its clusters of straw, his pig was chewing soil and his chickens their own feathers, and he went around looking worse than a coolie without a contract, hunted down by the gendarmes. His neighbors would go after him. The frankest ones would say to him: Hey Esternome, Ninon’s left with a musician, and you’re looking in the river? And he would retort: She left with a mermaid. They thought he had gone mad. Those were my crawfish days, he said, I had fallen lower than a freshwater crawdaddy.”

-Patrick Chamoiseau, from Texaco, the section entitled “Barbecued Love”

Reminder to Self (1)

The summer nights are long, and the moon only pretends to be your friend. There is a certain threshold you cross, sometime after the bars have closed their doors and anyone with anything to do is finished with the day. You watch the moon with eyes that have lost the glow of expectation, and you wonder at the sort of person you must have become to inhabit this hour so keenly.

Once in a western canyon you watched a bird, trapped by the wind, unable to fly free. It meant nothing to you then, but it means everything to you now.

There is always tomorrow, you tell yourself.

If you are going to unfold your heart, do it gradually, like a flower opening itself to the spring.

quote.

I said, “This is my heart?”

God said, “This is your heart, and it is the vastest thing in existence.”

-Ruzbihan Baqli, 12th Century Sufi Mystic

dreams, dreams to remember

Here in exile we wait for the news, any sort of news. There are a certain few of us who know full well the implications of abandonment; indeed we have come to expect it as our lot in life. For some this smacks of the earth shattering, but for those of us with shit to do it is merely background noise. It would be useless to pretend that anything surprises anymore. The unholy act of putting words to paper necessitates a sort of amused detachment, a way of saying to hell with it without sacrificing an inch. All we have to lose is self-respect. 

I have dreams to remember too, but they aren’t the kind you sing about. Like Rimbaud I have grown sick of the world around me. It may be high time to light out for some distant backwater in hopes that the natives will be friendly, but somewhere in the back of my head it feels like a sort of betrayal. What hangs in the balance are the things that lie unsaid, that can never be said. I am only sick because I made myself that way. Not being honest with yourself is like sticking a finger down your throat, like throwing sand against the wind and expecting it to end up somewhere besides your own face.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

It has been raining and spring is starting to roll in like a thundercloud. It obscures everything I do. Just when the molasses is thickest, the sun comes out. It’s just as well. I’ll be swimming in the river soon enough, and already I feel that it will be a sort of awakening. I’ll shed my skin in the green water just as surely as any snake. It’s calling to me like a dinner bell, and I might just be hungry enough to answer it the right way this time around. I look at the people that have been popping up lately and something tells me I ought to recognize all of this from something I may have seen before, or dreamed maybe. 

But if life has taught me anything, it’s that everything is unpredictable except maybe the moon and the tides. Maybe even right and wrong aren’t so clear sometimes. I might just be in a place for a while where confusion is queen, where the unstruck note is the most important part of the whole orchestrated piece. I am planning on being okay with this, but I don’t expect anyone to follow me. 

I put on my moccasins earlier tonight and went out for a while. The air still has a chill to it but there is an electric urgency to it as well. The spring always comes when it is most needed, like a storm traveling thousands of miles just to water some poor dirt farmer’s crops. I have been in the wrong place for far too long, and I am not speaking of geography. I think I will choose to see these April showers as a sort of benediction, gently urging me on my way to some distant place, some place that I have seen before but never quite reached.

Some Parting Words

It is the anger that is most surprising. We are a society of large reactions, and if our current state was a ping-pong match and not a social philosophy, we might be doing rather well at the moment. But as it stands things aren’t as peachy as they might be. I know I don’t match up so well and in the future I am going to learn to keep my mouth shut. We have become very adept at fitting into the whole thing but I fear I have become a lost cause. Oh well. Nous habite mais mourir, and more power to it. Everyone wants to bend everyone else to their vision, to make everyone see things the way they see them. I know very few people personally who do not feel this way. I myself have been this way at times.

It is the disease of our days, and it breeds hopelessness. There doesn’t seem to be a line that can be drawn, and for all the line-drawers out there it makes things seem mighty desperate. I don’t even know what compassion means to people anymore. I wish to meet people who live like birds and laugh like fools; but I fear they have gone the way of the buffalo. These are strange times, and I hope to move on to something else before the winter runs its full course.

Draw away from your tyrannies, friends, and embrace your enemies. Try to love someone before it is too late. Let’s not figure things out like a computer, but instead let us leave the ninety-nine behind to search for the one. I don’t wish to speak on this much more in the future, because I have said all I know to say. I am hopeful for the future in spite of everything, but the indictment stands: we live in the age of the cynic, and we’d sooner spend our time counting flowers than smelling them.