mothers' day

when I was young, I wept because I was weak and helpless,
I could not contain my pain, and my mother held me to her breast;
now I am grown, I hold my mother in my breast, I am strong and fierce,
and I weep because I cannot contain my ecstasy.

Tout Abus Sera Muni

Fabrice Ducouret 

My trusty Honda died a few weeks ago, masha'Allah. Twenty-one years old, 17 under my dominion, sold to me by my mother for the obligatory dollar, and it outlasted her by ten years. Died in the south-facing left turn lane of Sacramento Street at Dwight Way, waiting for the light, taking me to my ptherapist for maybe the 199th time. Another challenge, another blessing. Within thirty seconds of lifting the hood with a helpless, apologetic shrug to those trapped behind, a ginger Irishman in a candy-flake shamrock green pickup stopped to help me kick my dear teal car-cass to the curb.

So, I've been walking a lot—even got my bike repaired—and riding the bus quite a bit, especially in the East Bay, and I think I've put my finger on the essence of the vastly different passenger experiences between East and West Bay.

AC Transit drivers, you see, tend to think their job is to move people around the city, taking them to work, to shop, to see their loved ones, or just soothe their madness for a while with the illusion of escape, or progress toward some other, better, place. The bus is just the means whereby the fundamental civic value of mobility is served. We get on, we exchange greetings, thank yous and you're welcomes are commonplace. There are little movies on some buses, a slideshow of coaches through the years, a tiny documentary on the coming hydrogen generators... The humanity and solicitousness of the drivers sets the tone for cheerful cooperation among riders to provide seats and space for the variously burdened or challenged, and it's generally a satisfying, if slow, means to an end. I get off the bus feeling relaxed and grateful.

SF Muni drivers, by contrast, generally consider their job to be driving the bus, while cleaving to a schedule. This is why they almost universally consider their lowly human cargo such a disagreeable impediment to the next lavish paycheck on the slippery slope to retirement. Again, this morning, the 28 driver yelled threats at the cattle to mooove back into an already overcrowded coach, proving once again they consider it our fault that we are so numerous, and never imagine that we, the folks in whose name, and by whose tax dollars they are privileged to have a fucking job, might just need another fucking bus to come along in a goddamned hurry! 

This is why I tend to despise these odious hell-spawn, who lord over their tiny diesel fiefdoms with such infuriating wrongheadedness. Another challenge, but the blessing of a twice-daily opportunity to rise above, while riding along, I admit, often eludes me. Last night, I missed an AC Transit bus by seconds, coming home late, tired and hungry, but the memory of good rides opened a space in my heart to encompass my anger, and the wait for the next one afforded me time to consider the temptations of sorcery (as it happened) among shamanic practitioners, and I was glad to have this lesson handed to me for the price of an 18 minute sojourn in my moral imagination.

I look forward to resuming my privileged status as a driver, this time with an ancient, elegant, biodiesel burning German tank, within a couple of weeks. As a result of my adventure in carlessness, I'll ride my bike more, and consider taking the bus for certain journeys, but only on the sunrise side of the Bay, insha'Allah! 

My invisible tattoo

I have long since vaulted the watershed
that parts youth and age,
now my rivulets all gather
to the great ocean, to death, and beyond

I have never been inked, and may I never be, but if I did invite the prickly pen to inscribe a passing whim, I would put the name of this blog, Memento mori, smack in the middle of my left palm, the omphalos of my phallus-grabber. I know, not very original. It might as well say Carpe diem, or Smell the roses, or Ho bios brakhys, hê de tekhnê makrê, or Quod vos estis, ego quondam fui; etc., etc., fer chrissakes. But, why doesn't it; why won't I?

Well, I used to hold most of the inked tribe in mild contempt: poseurs, dilettantes, naïve cultural imperialists, Māori wannabes, gokudō wannabes, fake Petak Island maffiya pedigrees, adenoidal ADX Florence dreamers, modern primitives (I'll grant this: they are vastly more primitive than the humblest indigene), right down to stamped tramps, cutesy butterfly barbies, fucking hipsters. Narcissists all, and not in a good way: I'm special; I've suffered; I belong; look at me, I'm not like everyone else! Riiiight...


OK, my projector is way overheated–bulb is smoking–and I've settled down a bit, and am gradually retiring my trebuchet of aspersions. After all, back in the day, some hard-working witch doctor was just trying to protect the tribe, invoking the spirits, the elements, warding off the worst, because the worst is out there, waiting. Protecting, identifying, remembering, connecting: these are good things, or can be.

http://www.threehandspress.com/odalisque.php

My search for the perfect tattoo ratcheted up when I saw an ad for a very special book recently, The Three Hands Press "Odalisque" Journal:

Limited to 433 exemplars

bound in full black hard-grained Nigerian goatskin

raised bands on spine

100 lb. acid-free writing stock

garnet 80 lb. art paper endsheet, crush emboss

black satin ribbon marker

The most notable feature of this codex is not that all 192 100 lb. acid-free pages are merely blank. This is a grimoire of great power. As their pitch declares:

Certain magical teachings convey that the most potent books are those which remain unwritten, for such a state allows infinite possibilities, providing the fluidity of inspiration and power from the great reservoir of the Unmanifest.

Now that's what I'm talking about! What better way to say Remember, you will die, than with an invisible tattoo? Those of us on the way down with eyes to see can see it every day, in the mirror, in each other, in the way the gazes of the young and restless glide right past, or right through...

I've always had this invisible tattoo. Now, I know it. I may not be special, but I sure as hell belong. Look at me!

Oy weigh iz mir

There once was a middle-aged fellow, call him Lamb Perdue, heavy and sad. Sad, that is, when he wasn't irritable and mean, mean to himself and to others. Divorced, lonely, and often feeling friendless and despondent, his depression kept him isolated, and as his hoarding grew and grew, and the trash piled in drifts like filthy snow, there seemed less and less possibility of lightening his load, or of gladdening his heart with visits from his dwindling friends, to say nothing of taking a lover! Who would want him, with so much flesh, and so much darkness?

He had stayed in therapy for years after his separation and divorce, only leaving his trainee when she was unable to accept his new forged covenant with cannabis, to pierce the darkness of his imprisonment. He made her cry, when he rejected her help, in favor of a forbidden medicine. The tactics and tricks he had learned with her, to identify his distorted thoughts, to challenge his hurtful beliefs, seemed like too much work for too little reward. He stayed depressed, and alone, and forgot his pain in the evenings an hour at a time, snug in the blissful embrace of cannabis.

Still, as the years of his life abandoned him, and his health declined, and his weight increased, and his joints got stiffer, and there was less and less room to dance or breathe in his little house, he still nurtured small flames of hope, deep in his imagination.

Three little flames Lamb kept burning in the hope of liberation from sadness: to outrun it with vigorous movement, to see through it with observant stillness, and to transcend it in the crucible of love. Movement, but not dancing, which challenged his awkwardness too much, but just a little exercise, to stir the blood, and maybe ease his bulky clumsiness. At the University, he pumped the machines with his arms and legs, and puffed and sweated and coughed, and sometimes felt better.

Closer to home, he found sangha with other seekers, and sat vipassana, and breathed, and coughed, and breathed some more, and coughed, and sent metta to the far corners of the universe, and sometimes felt better. But movement did not compel him, and stillness did not soothe him, and neither fed his deepest hungers, nor even showed him what they might be.

And all this time, season upon season, all the fragrant springs, all the smoky autumns, all these empty years, there were no playful dances of flirtation, no bright interludes of love, no urgent intimacies of bodies become one. Surely, he knew the rapture of infatuation, but only from afar, and he knew it had to be that way, for whenever he let slip his secret, his beloved would shy away, or scowl in anger, or pierce him with a shrug. Better to be almost alone, he said, alone but for dreams of my beloved, whoever she may be. I'll never stop longing. I must always long for someone, he said, and feed myself on dreams, or starve in silent agony.

And Lamb risked another experiment, to combine the stillness and the movement, and just by chance, he learned a hard lesson of love. Hatha yoga is millennia deep, and just as demanding, and his aching limbs could scarcely twist into the simplest asanas. He tried too hard for a couple of teachers, and then a teacher arrived who changed him, and his world. Her given name meant Bright Sanctuary in the old tongue. She was no child, but much younger than he, and very lovely, and kind and gentle, and above all, serious and skilled in the postures, the philosophy, and their teaching. 

Eros & Thanatos

Lamb's heart stopped when he first beheld her, and then beat so quickly. She had a generous, sensuous fullness from her father, a man of the south, and blue eyes and sharp cheeks from her northern mother, and her honeyed hair came from somewhere between. Her dazzling smile, like clouds parting for the sun, soothed and ingratiated all who found her, and only a few glimpsed the forlorn girl, the lost girl for whom the clouds always returned.

Her light, her shade, her kindness, her patience, her beauty, all enlivened with quick sparks of fury for obstacles, for foolishness and the tentative; all her qualities moved Lamb in ways that demanded much of him. Here, for perhaps the first time, he saw a woman he longed to give children, and for whose love he would joyfully pay any price, including his life. And while he knew this for a dream, it was a dream of great power, a power whose source he might find, and so he let his hopeless love grow.

And Lamb's love only grew, as she showed him his many fears, and the deep pain, resignation and neglect inscribed in his flesh. And harder, she showed him, with just her presence, his defects of character, of judgment, his frivolousness, and all manner of painful truths, all plain and simple in her glorious mirror. And as his image grew more flawed, so hers grew more sublime. And as his heart broke, as the true distance between them was revealed, so he clung all the harder to the beatific vision.

In the crucible of his aching heart, as his spirit guttered and threatened to extinguish, the yoga of bhakti, of devotion, of selfless love, was revealed to him, stronger than in his past infatuations, for his small self could no longer contain this great and powerful love. And then he began to see that it was not just Bright Sanctuary that he loved, that she indeed was becoming an outline without a face, a portal through which he saw, not just a pretty girl with a troubled spirit, but a goddess, a radiant incarnation of the divine feminine. 

And then Lamb knew he could not chase Bright Sanctuary and hope to encounter the goddess, for She did not so much reside in the girl, as hover, in subtle immanence, somewhere between his perception, and Her immortal realm. And worse, he could not hope to know Her, to find the source, for his only understanding of himself was as a weak and broken creature, a weary amalgam of flesh and spirit. This was not bhakti, for the goddess could not love him, or so he thought, to his despair. Nowhere in himself would he find Her counterpart; the idea did not even occur. He had no notion that the divine masculine could manifest through him, though that might have eased his pain. And when his teacher moved on, he lingered with other teachers for a bit, before falling away again into darkness, into years without bright sanctuary.

Dream us in furs

Dream, night of 4/30–5/1/13

Scene is an impromptu market, under a fractured overpass, in a shattered city, under leaden skies. Several hunter/warrior archetypes are staffing tables of pelts and furs. Off to the side, a gaggle of pasty masculinity tourists teeter slack-jawed, fidgeting, as one of the hunters patiently prepares them for some weekend work involving minor pelts: squirrel, rabbit, dog.

Armael Malinis

I am here on my own, drawn by something grander, but I can't remember or articulate my desire. An old hunter, also a shaman/magician, knows exactly what I'm here for, and digs out a magnificent elk, with lustrous, wolf-like fur, a real magic carpet of a pelt, and we admire it together, in silence, and are deeply moved.

But then my doubts creep in, and I ask myself: What would I do with it? I wouldn't want to waste it. I bet it's really expensive, and I know I have rejected the offering, and failed the initiation, and the dream collapses into sour, wistful wakefulness.

By happy coincidence, I saw my Hakomi ptherapist later in the day, and was able to journey to the dream and re-engage with the old hunter:

At first he presented as stoic, yet loving, waiting, with the perfume of sorrow and disappointment that I could not accept his gift. I became the unsure boy, and was ashamed, recalling other gifts, unopened, squandered.

I was invited to enter the wise old man, to view the boy from elsewhere, but my boy-self could not take that step, could not claim his power. Instead, I knew the boy must address the gift: what would he do with it? what would melt his reticence?

With gratitude, with tears, the boy wraps himself in the magic cloak he thought was a pelt, and knows thereby he has the protection of the helping spirits, and their love. Now, he can accept himself as an unsure boy, a boy who needs love and protection. And suddenly he is both boy and man, wise old hunter and tearful initiate, occupying all the roles in the spiral of his life.

And now he can see the pasty gaggle as the boy he was, and see them with love, and hope. And the view from the market, once fading to dim chaos, receding across the blasted city, now opens to vistas of subtle magic, to realms uncharted, and the not-boy, wrapped in his cloak, calm and clear-eyed, takes his next step.