AS THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE SHIFTS, and reasonable people come to terms with changes like ethnic “minorities” (if measured within invisible borderlines)  becoming “majorities” (which we already are on this land mass!), some oldsters will cling to the  past. They will throw down their septic sandbags at the foot of a tidal flow that is fed by the nourishing delta-heart of creation, and thus can never be denied. These Legacy-breathers shuffle forth and begin to appear at the horizon; a pale, flaking flock of white fright, powdered jowls quivering like cognac-plumped jelly slouching down in the heat of a tropical dawn, the Old Guard begins to meltdown in public, tears of hatred, tears of Vicks, tears of frustration, scowls carved to appeal to the Working Middle Class, nails buffed and polished to protect their fine linens and thin skins. They shriek about “skewed” blogs and losing the moat, they fear for their authority, they dare not question the stilts that have vaulted them to their esteemed position. They know not how to bend, and so they will break. And they will break well-paid, and they will break all that has been made, and they will break in public and day after day after day. Until their scabrous, dinosaur empire has finally sifted, sunwise, into dust. Which, by nature’s decree, it must.

And where will they be? Where will the Bunker of Whiteness and the minions of yesterday’s errant ways manifest to bray back the bay of dawn?

FOX news! Home of Imus, Beck, O’Reilly, and soon…Lou?

But it is nice that they’ll be easy to find, all coagulating in one spot. Like a ring of zombie ants surrounding a lollipop of rot!

spoken version here

O,
how hard it is to see you
as brightly veneered your face
as quickly as you leach
the color
from the bounteous world around you
make it all like a caul surround you
reinvent it so it’s all about you
take it all in to wither inside you
soaking up the pigment
and substance of that which
upon you rest and like oxygen rely
¬but only in silence
¬and only at night
hungrily swallowing
an earth colored sea of evergreening time
a reddened canon of ancient instruction
a golden forest of organic invention
a dark and damp garden of toil and fruition

and all with barely a cold
ashflake flutter
of your cataract-crazy
unblinking
I

O,
those knuckles clenched and
blanched and wrapped round redacted
unholy unwrit
your snickering sketch of bright boneless wit
slender fingers snatch apples in
a walled and blackened orchard
eyes of blindness that only for a symbol cry
mimicking sunshapes
harvesting ruby-stained tearshaped fake faith
to bring to your nest
your maw marred mess
cradling the field’s yield under darkening sky
your brood of a feather all coddled together
fed with fatty falsehood and
painted with lye but

O,
nothing will be denied you

the great appreciator
the swift appropriator
the certain abnegator
the terrain-shifting
culture-lifting
renegotiator of histories
and destinies
convening your church of cruel mastery
polishing frustrated weaponry
practicing apostasy of integrity

O—
how very hard it is to see you
as loudly as you claim your space
as brightly veneered your face
as wide as you spread your barbedwire wings
to outline a well-defined shape
empty
but for a centuries-old hunger and hate
hands clenched full
of all you can strip from the giving landscape
your trumpet but an echo
of all those wailing around you
and behind you and below you and
all to the tune
a borrowed warbling hollow
the sneaking of wind dry and low
crawling through cornfield and rice as you go
leaving them bleached salted fallow
bodies and codicils collected
on your windowsills
burning like candles
like skin bone flesh tallow
to illuminate
a shallow
insatiable
vacuous
platinum
soul

IT’S THE LOVE, OF COURSE. The love in people’s eyes. That’s what makes them recognizable, what makes them come across as strong. That’s when we trust a voice or a hand; that’s what makes us beautiful at all.

When I was a child I grew up in a community that was spiritually based. That’s what the nightly meetings were about, the weekly potluck Sundays, the occasional festivals like Holi or Hans Jayanti. That’s what filled the room when we sang the Aarti. (As you can tell these are not Spanish nor English words. La Mezcla-Fantastica is the completamentelastica that has buoyed this boy’s happenstancika as I came up on this path!)

As I grew older, I always felt more at home with that community, even if I met members years later, or children I hadn’t seen since the days we were in childcare together at one of the festivals or when satsang was held (nightly) at someone’s house in the neighborhood. I thought this feeling was purely the familiarity of the community, or that we had shared an era…or a niche experience. I thought the comfort was purely cultural—which I admit, it is in no small part. The environments that surround us as children are never rivaled again. I’m sure a great part of my love for tortillas, and all that pervades my being when I smell that steamed corn is simply from the days I was young and my nanita was in my life.

But as I did grow older, and returned to attend speaking events and looked at the people there, I saw that the magnetic resonance was not so complicated or esoteric or superficial.

What drew me to those people and that community more than anything else (in their better moments; of course there are always crazies and strays in any group) was simply love. It’s the love in the eyes. These were people striving to be in touch with the most basic truths in a living being’s possession; they were doing their best to remain conscious and open and true. After all, religious paradigms and spiritual practices (and there’s a big difference between practices and paradigms, let us not skim over this!) exist not for themselves (and if they do, you know you are on a dead end) but to enable the human to access awareness, love, truth, clarity.

And when these things are alive in the face and hands and voice and eyes…a human being shines with light.

Now this is nothing new to you. You know that as people get afraid and jealous and scared their eyes can cloud with fear, or envy, or anger, or smugness…and tho no hard lines can be drawn around age or location or langauge, it’s not unreasonable to say that we travel from being children with giant orbs of liquid truth in our face with which to express our soul—to somewhat confused and crazy characters so well trained in eluding even our own detection that the eyes no longer stream love, they reflect and glimmer with hotspots overfocused as well as shadows that have bounced off seven sets of mirrors and each one with a different film on the surface.

But then there are times when the tensions fall away, the burred steel shields clatter to the ground, the sun rises over the ocean of the soul and beams forth from los ojos. When we engage truthfully with our desire and path and so let the Self fall away. Yesterday I wrote of the “lean toward DO.”

You will see it when an artist focuses on her work, or a mechanic is deeply engaged in a trying task, or a father carefully cleans the face of his daughter, or  an activist feels they have been given more power to do what it is she feels compelled to do in the world, or is in the company of others ready to fight the same fight that matters to her own heart. You can see this energy when a human looks out over beauty, or breathes deep the ocean mist into his body or when he deeply inhales the sex of a blooming and heated flower, or when he give himself without fear into the keeping of another he trusts or admires. And a million more examples. There are even more instigators of our love and joy as there are sources that would steal it from us.

Love, and some of this is what was in the air at the NAM Expo, or what you can find at any convention, and what rejazzes the heart. This is what works when friends work well together. This is what powers the muscles to not give up…yet.

I won’t go so far as to say “all you need is love” because if that were true, we wouldn’t have stomachs. (And yes, I get the metaphor which demands examination of the word “need” and that’s an important talk, too.) What my friend Erika calls a male’s propensity to become erect over all of life (and its a metaphorical erection she speaks of, right Erika?) is an embracing, a want to engage, to rumble, to feel, to fight, to know up close and all about and at once. She was saying it in the context that it’s not a will or behavior to be suppressed, this eager, stupid, lapping at and celebration of everything. She was maybe laughing at my being in love with everyone at the convention, but this is a joyful reaction from which I would not retreat; this way of leaping deep up and into the velvety keep of each and any river, mound, hill, or mountain no matter how steep. It is daring to bare the face, to love out loud and love and love more and love again, to offer my entirety to the Come Again; and again, even when crushed or doubtful or jealous or hopeless or momentarily riddled with face-cramping madness; to see these lacks and gaps as simply pulses of offness, of inbetweenness, of half the (off)beatness, of shadows that swim around a geyser and always agushing with light, to forget about getting it straight or sensible or getting it Right.

Remember what makes us move, what makes it worth it, what we bother to protect, what it is we hope to grow. And just move, and just flow, and just let it all go.

I CAME TO THIS WORLD from far, far away. From a land now almost four decades in the past. In a setting so different than this one I can barely recognize my way around at times. More importantly, amidst philosophies and a worldview that is given little room in today’s social dialogues. That is no obstacle…it is an opening, a clearing, a path that remains with me. It can be placed down projected over laid across any thicket or tumble of stone and still lead me home.

Sometimes I feel my truest views mesh with the current political and social conversations not at all, if rather jarringly. As an alien, I do take part. To the best of my ability. But the truth is, I rarely find long-lasting excitement or joy or comfort or satisfaction in so much of what this culture offers, what the media offers, what even us serious people so often entertain. As I’ve said, I wear it all very loosely. A garment that matches me at times. For a moment. A reader may find that my writing sometimes dances with a self-mocking tone, and when not being plain outraged, takes on a comic tint. What a casual reader may not know is that when it does, I am at my most earnest.

I struggle with certain paradigms championed in the news or online. We stumble onto them and they are blessed for they can address a problem or a lacking which has needed to be so met. But too often, instead of letting them take hold of us, grip and shake and break up our thinking for a time before falling away and leaving only the parts we’ve found can be organically molded, melded, or taken in as our own truth, we end up in a cage of thought. THIS worked one time, so let me always use THIS. Let me see everything through THIS. But life is always new, and is no One Well-Proven Thing. Being tricked into seeing it as such is not the fault of our TV or our politicians. I see this is a human behavior and it will probably always be with us.

We are always new. Every moment is new. No moment need be like anything that came before, even when the resemblance is striking and our imagination lacking. And yet, of course we must learn from who we once were. But to let a lesson that once helped inform every step forward is to walk an old path, and to preclude the sight of new horizons from our view.

Many people I read or come across are educated well in their area, and finding these people and their writings which demonstrate the education they have proves extremely helpful to me. As has so much of my own education. But being amongst so many others with so many different lessons and backgrounds… O, how I use you all! Like a mass of teachers. I will flit and fly among you like a crow. Landing on a fence here, or a stone there, a wall here, a stump here. Perhaps for a time a shoulder or a hand, even. Watching, listening, nodding, stealing. For a time. Until I find those places (and this will always happen and it’s a good thing) where I just cannot connect to the lesson anymore. The treasures are finding those willing to smash their own surety, and feeling myself rise with the bravery they demonstrate.

Because life is not like a series of books in a course on …anything. It fluctuates. We fluctuate. We are not a being, but a becoming, as Friedrich once said. And sometimes ideas are hammered out and we draw lines and walls and are told we fall on one side or the other and so do our thoughts and so does all that follows from them…and so it goes. We buy into these illusory borders, too. Even this blog pretends demarcations that at moments are nothing more than a signpost, or a cape slung over the shoulder of a spiritual vagrant. In the name of this joining of spirit and matter that I am, and in the aim of not dispersing into the sixteen winds like an explosion of ancient dandelion rune, it is at times important to imagine contained and definable elements of my Self; distinctions that separate I from the Other. 

I am far more comfortable navigating the in-between than I am in any Place. I like no thing as much as the coming and going from one to another. It is on the purpling beaches of dusk and the roseing gauze of dawn that my true eye shines lidless and I see so much more than in broad daylight. In the falling away of my tired husk I remember my shape can only be held temporarily. And to cling too tightly to it is to rot.

Being sure is but the borderwall we place around a heart to ward off the skinstripping wind of the next living moment.

I’VE LOVED THE DAWN FOR YEARS because I like being alone with the planet when the sun rises. I like beginning before the street does, before the noise does, before the thoughts in my mind cramp and clutter in clusters and shooting diagonals and bubbling up antagonals, before the exhaust fills the air and my lungs and dulls the day down into evening. In the early morning, I hold my tall, tomato-red coffee cup (with the yellow inside) and I inhale five times, long and slow and deep. 

ah…there’s the dew in the grass

…and there is the sky

…the sweet mossy scent of the soil

…and there is the bakery…buns, dough, butter

…the cool concrete has its own smell, too

and i could go on and on and on, drawing this freshly rested world into my lungs. i only stop because i worry about sounding strange to a neighbor. it’s a worry that enters my mind like a dawdling hatchback climbs onto the highway ramp. a little buzz alone and slightly awkward in all the tranquility.

i watch it move into the distance.

the sun slowly lifts up and everything begins turning coral, peach, pinkish gold. salmon, grapefruit, day-colored.

i am here alone for now. i didn’t even bring my camera, or any of my cameras, videocameras, sound recorders, or iPhone. i am only here with my coffeecup, warm against my palm. watching shadows silently shift on the brickface of my apartment. they are leaf shadows, and behind them is the sun.

another thought blinks right and zooms forward you should get your camera that light is amazing

i move my eyes over to the bushes that crowd the sidewalk. i don’t want to fiddle with buttons and settings right now. i don’t want to bring a robot into this moment with me. they have me most of the day.

the sun should be screaming. the mountain-sized beam of light is white hot. there is a huge and powerful silence in the air. the sunbeam washes without pause over the tallest tips of the bush. an untrimmed hedge, and random shoots have risen above the rest. 

a moment ago there was a bicyclist who leaned on their brakes and turned into the alley behind me. now, there is no movement on the street. it is only i and the sun and three branches from a bush.

i watch them. they only stand in that light, reaching, reaching, glowing.

the sun watches all of us.