If you're so smart, why aren't you _____?

Somewhere, deep in my childhood, there was a moment of parental skullduggery, a strained silence that was all but clandestine. All but, because I knew something was up, something about me that was not for my ears. Don't you hate that? Those whispered truths, just out of earshot?

My best friend's mother, and closest neighbor, a school psychologist, was only slightly less oblique, and thus only slightly more helpful, in this moment, and generally, when it came to the infuriating, opaque mysteries of adulthood. The G-word was in the air.

IQ Tests. The one test whose score they don't, as far as I know, let the tested see, not right away. There was something about mine, my troubled gut told me, that disturbed the adults in my life. Maybe I can see their point. I was already alienated, depressed, withdrawn, shy, lonely, introverted, awkward, psychoanalysed, plump and grumpy. What good would it do to let me know that here is yet another quality I possess that would forever separate me from my peers?

Except that I knew already, of course, that something was different about me, but I guess I didn't have a name for it. And then there were the stern, well-meaning, almost pitying lectures about how wrong it was to flaunt our privileges, which were notable. Were they worried about creating a monster? Is that why they preferred keeping me in the dark to helping me cope?

Farmboy, soldier, freak, teacher.

© www.razlan.net

The eternity of a child's summer is not ambered, but rhythmed with daily adventure.

The rural Northeast, verdant and sultry. A country road eases through the trees, past the old house, over the bridge spanning a chuckling brook. An immense silence, scoped by distant lowing, shelters my reveries.

An approaching tock, tock startles me to presence. A walking stick, a queasy presage. He's coming.

But how? He's blind. His terrible aspect now a terrifying visage. Yet he courses that gentle road, steady and true, daily, unfailing, undeterred by maimed limbs, his gait like clockwork, tock, tock. Now I would add, a jaunty stride, but there long ago, in my horror of his deformity, his swagger was lost on me.

But not his perseverance, nor his clockwork appearance, marking the passage of time, surer than meals, surer than sleep. The end will come, and autumn chase us away. Who is that? my blunt, offended question. An aunt, kind eyes veiled, answers: a local. I name him Hardacre. Not a mayfly like us summer folk. Thus, a farmboy, gone off to war years past, and returned to his home broken, hideous, and to my eyes, worse than useless. A monster. A freak. Come to spoil the cloudless blue perfection, the new mown idyll of my timeless paradise.

Almost fifty years have passed. I was, in my way, wounded, too. Then, and now. Whole of limb and blessed, each sense keen, my wounds, though hidden, were plain to many. Now, as I heal myself, my cruel disdain returns and demands atonement. And Hardacre is there, tock, tock, steady, oblivious, and yet not unforgiving, his first gift to me. Though not his first lesson: my first hint of death's iron surety, my first glimpse of pain and mutilation born of war. Of life's unfairness, and the long road we may yet have to limp, though we soldier on, and frighten the children.

His wounds, plain to all, hid his essential wholeness from my child's eyes, his second gift to me, received only yesterday, as I, blinded by sight, now see with my heart, a world new, bright, and timeless.

Boughs & vines, entwined

As I free fall into a carnival of New Age stereotypes, choosing my words with care is a welcome, grounding, chore.

One new-to-me concept of great utility is the container, with which we hold space, for a notion, an intention, a relationship. In Hakomi: relationship, especially the therapeutic relationship between therapist, client, and whoever else is immanent. The therapist fosters the bubble, in which he witnesses and encourages the client to witness and encourage her own healing evolution. Beautiful work, this: right action, right speech, creating the container for precious cargo, the unfolding human soul.

So why does this word grate on my ears, and set my eyes to rolling?

Maybe it's the associations. Containers are what fast food comes in. Containers are piled high in every port, when they're not littering the beach. What needs containing in our world? Radioactive waste, plague vectors, social breakdown, errant desires...

Maybe it's the lineage. Somehow, container is all about the function, good, bad or indifferent. 

Latin continēre, to hold together, keep together, comprehend, contain —OED, as well as the following

Good as far as it goes, until you notice the controlling, reductionist scrutiny, and we're right back to quelling something that wants to escape. I'm drawn to words whose roots grabbed earth before Rome paved the way back to itself across the West. You know, the languages of barbarians, where all of our best four letter words come from. Container, well... marches straight back to Rōma. 

I long for something else, a word freighted with an agency and intention more appropriate to the project, and I've come up with: bower

Old English búr dwelling, etc., corresponding to Old Saxon bûr
A dwelling, habitation, abode... especially, a vague poetic word for an idealized abode

Yes, better, something built, with a lofty intention, to restore something lost, to house ourselves in sylvan splendor (I admit, L. silvānae, goddesses of the woods). But, it gets better:

An inner apartment... especially applied to a lady's private apartment; a boudoir

Thus we imagine a gentle realm of intimacies, of shared secrets away from the harsher, masculine realm of commerce and politics, although this might rightly be challenged and derogated (L. dērogāre to repeal in part, etc.) by feminisms undreamt of in the 14th Century, and only now roiling brows hidden by burqas and chadors...

And, best of all, because it evokes my preferred, long view, transpersonal, ecological memespace

A place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants; a shady recess

Photo: missy_gardenwhimsy

Now we have all the aspects that make bower so attractive to me: a constructed refuge, woven with care over time, from natural elements, to hold the things we love, in a place of mindful intimacy, a soul solacing retreat from all that wounds us, where we abide with all that would heal us. Yay!

I hold a vision of the post-historical future, of the fractal bower of our survival: the great bower of Gaia, tended by a billion loving spirits, sharing bowers of home and garden, each spirit weaving many relationships within and among, embowered by loving regard, and our better angels.

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.