The Summer of My Discontent, and Blisters

Field notes, June 5th, 2014. Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic, waiting on a drink.

The smell of hot asphalt in the summer and memories of a kid back there in the haze. I am unsure how to feel about it. Mixed emotions and hydrocarbons are uneasy partners. 

Tarmac bringing me back to the flush of adolescence. Summertime trip, foolishness of youth to think I could run across a quarter-mile of blacktop, barefoot, on pavement that might as well have been a cast-iron griddle hot over the coals. 

I did it. Because I was stupid in the vein of teenage boys, I did it. By the time I returned to the car I had blisters the size of walnuts on the soles of my feet. First day of summer vacation and I was hobbling like a drunk chicken. So much for impressing the bikini girls down by the pier. 

It means more to me now than it did that melted cotton candy summer. On the border between goofy little boy and awkward proto-man, I lacked enough confidence and self-awareness to be saddened by the realization that I was not going to get laid. 

I was fascinated, and still am, by maps. Girls were foreign countries in an atlas on the bookshelf, at that point in my life. Maps to be studied, pored over, committed to memory but never visited. The cartography of my puberty consisting of names, codes, symbols on paper. 

The female of the species. A puzzling, fascinating and undiscovered country. I knew them well, yet knew them not at all.

Two Years Before the Mast or Something Like It

8:06 PM. Night is falling earlier on this slow slide into fall. A mirror of my days, methinks.

Monday, October 7th is an anniversary of sorts. The day will mark two years since I last plied the profession of architect full-time. Well, with one very small exception, plied it any time, to be precise. The demon of this particularity caught up to me in broad daylight. A mental mugging, minding my own business at a stoplight.

Hardly seems fair, I know. Enormous effort has been expended in the past two years, first on searching for a position suited to my training. Then when that became increasingly fruitless, Sisyphean even, my efforts were slowly diverted to searching for a position suited to my skills and interests.

You see what I did there? With the "training" segueing into "skills and interests"? I knew you could.

It was an inevitable transition, in hindsight. Anyone who has been laid off more than once knows that looking for a job is a full-time job. Old habits die hard, and I was up early and working the job lists and directories and cold-calling and frankly it ground down my resolve and self-esteem to the point where I had no energy to even be desparate anymore.

I was, though. The sheer effort in looking for an architecture job, with no results to show for it, haunts me even now. It is draining to think about it. The knowledge that no one seemed to be interested in a talented, skilled and licensed architect with 20+ years of experience (i.e. Yours Truly) is a puzzling and disheartening burden to carry. At the time, it was all I had and all I knew how to do.

Not that I have forgotten how to do it, mind you, but I have had almost no arena in which to practice it. So in essence I gave it up. I had to, so I could focus on other ways to preserve my sanity and hopefully make money. Thus, writing and photography began to eclipse what I was trained to do. Possibilities formed in my mind, of an intersection between the Want To and the Must Do sides of the coin of life.

I can say I have had some minor successes in that regard. I have exhibited in a local gallery, made some contacts in the art world, garnered some part-time work in photography, sold a few prints. So there are signs of encouragement. The writing has not had the same level of interest, it continues to be a slow go, but there have been some nibbles.

Still, the hard work continues. My figurative heels are sore and bleeding from all the nipping they endure, courtesy of the imps and demons that seem to shadow me, messing with my dreams. I fight them off as best I can, but every so often the shield slips and they get through.

Today at a stop light, a chunk of the sky fell on me and I flinched. Breathing hard through a squall of panic, my mind reeled over and over, thinking I must be nuts for trying to make so much out of nothing. The voice (you know the voice) whispered from the backbrain cave that maybe it would be best to give up carving a new path in this old jungle, when there is a perfectly good path somewhere behind me.

All I need to do is turn around, retrace my steps, and I can put down the machete. The path back there is dusty, rutted and beaten down. The rocks in it, the thorns flanking it, well they can't be as bad as the unknown overgrown thickets I am thrashing through, can they? It would so much easier to go back, would it not? Simply trade the promise of uncharted territory for the drab security (which is not so secure) I used to know?

The light changed. The breath wooshes out of my lungs. The car rolls forward, I make the turn, and try to put the past behind me. Two years before my own personal mast have taken me over strange new seas and into uncharted lands fraught with promise. It would be a shame to give up the ship when there is something wonderful on the horizon.

Shattered Tarn: A Love Meditation

November 30th, 9:57 PM. Weary, and thinking about moonlight on the water.

In the absence of wind and aquatic life, a full moon reflects perfectly on the surface of the lake. Casting in a stone shatters the silence and the lunar countenance, silver shards refracting and splintering in the wavelets. Such a sight may upset the peace we seek within ourselves. The perfection, or near-perfection, that the senses lead one to believe is there is gone in that instant. Celestial harmony has been disturbed; we anguish over it not returning.

So we wait. We take small breaths, attempting no movement. The shards merge and separate in a liquid dance plucking at the strings of the mind. We hold on to dimming hope tempered by the realization that the surface of the lake will never truly sit still. It never did. The promise of that reflection was peace and harmony. It was a place in the universe where balance was achieved, now broken. Perhaps this invokes small despair, and we lament a loss.

Sitting on the shore of that mountain lake in our hearts, we gaze upon the moon on the water and think it perfection. We fear its destruction. But our casting of stones into the water destroys the reflection, not that which shines. To lament this shattering is a deceptive path, one that we would do well to avoid. The attachment to that reflection is the shackle of anxiety. The shackle can be broken if we turn our eyes to the sky, and offer thanks not to reflected light, but to the moon.

Boundary Conditions (Sunday Meditation #21)

September 22nd, 2012. 7:31 PM. On the front patio, in the company of a dog. Serenaded by crickets, wind and faint barks from a few yard over. It is reflection.

Well. I see that it has been almost a week since I have administered the purge to my brain. There is no surprise here, but there is a tinge of melancholy. To write sometimes to me is to live. It is to feel. Feel in ways I occasionally have difficulty in allowing myself to experience, or perhaps, understand is the better term. The page or the screen, like the camera lens, affords me a shield and a filter on the world. It allows the parsing of what often seems unparsable. 

I find I am in a bit of a fugue state. Weariness, of the mind and the heart, is blurring my edges and smearing me over the landscape of my existence. Four solid days of work have shored me up and worn me out. This has kept me from the page, from the keyboard. Not for lack of ideas, mind you; I've had quite many. The lack of...ambition? desire? energy? has forestalled my getting them out of my head.

I am bored, fed up with current events, with politics, yet those things have been the fuel for the fires of my mind in overdrive. There has been much to consider, much to say, but two things have (wisely) reeled me in: a desire to free my mind from the attachments of righteous anger, and a loss of appetite for 'pig wrestling' in the social sphere. If I may crib from The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in "Music and Politics":

If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics
I might be able to listen in silence to your concerns
Rather than hearing everything as an accusation
Or an indictment against me

That sort of describes my state of mind since the beginning of September. My attachments to certain beliefs and states of being had begun to mislead me, down a path of anxiety and negative emotions. And when I say 'current events' I include events not only in the world external to my life, but the one internal to it. Two events in particular have become signal bells in the cluttered temple of my mind.

The first was my visit back east for a long weekend with my daughter. The second was an evening stroll through an arts fair in my new, nearby, adopted hometown of Kansas City. Both made me rejoice, admire and celebrate. Both made me near to weep in humility and inadequacy. It was not until my afternoon break today that I had an inkling of why.

First thing: My daughter is beautiful, smart and luminous. She tests me, pushes me, exalts me. All that without guile or pretense or even true self-awareness. She is a mirror to my soul. It is one I gaze into frequently, when we are together and when apart. In that reflection I see the radiant joy and vampiric doubts that are peculiar to my fatherhood. The total of things I know about being a father is far outweighed by the total of things I don't know about being a father. On this last visit I wondered how I could be so lucky to have her as my daughter, and I hoped that someday she might think herself lucky that I am her dad.

Second thing: I have finally admitted to myself that perhaps, after all, I do have a modicum of skill and talent when it comes to photography. This led me to spend an evening, in good company, strolling amongst the light and sound and creative outpouring that was my first Plaza Art Fair in KCMO. So much wonder, so much beauty, so much expression of the creative urge. My encounters with two photographers induced the same exaltation and humiliation. Both had prints of photos I wish I had taken, from an artistic and a technical perspective. Both demonstrated to me that I have so much to learn about photography. I left the art fair in a slight brown study, which I hadn't quite left this morning.

So it was I found myself on break, leaning back on a bench, swaddled in shade with my head thrown back. I felt myself falling upward, pressured into a state of elastic resistance by the realities of myself and my circumstances. My daughter, those photographers, have shown me I am hemmed in by the knowledge I possess and the knowledge I wish to possess.  

I stared up between the gold-tinged leaves overhead, reveling in the electric blue sky tinged with its dreams of the coming fall. Thus was I illuminated: let go of the fear, embrace the unknown, and step through the boundary conditions of my soul.

Prayer Flags on Everest Cerebrum

Some time ago I discovered the delightful artifacts known as prayer flags, those humble yet amazing pieces of cloth whose purpose came to fill me with delight. Their roots are in India, they blossomed in Tibet (known as lung ta or darchor depending on the style) and somehow ended up flying in the cool winds caressing the Mount Everest of my mind.

It is my understanding that traditionally, the flags are used to promote compassion, strength, wisdom and peace. The idea is that the prayers and mantras written on the flags will be carried by the wind into the surrounding space. Thus, by power of the wind, good will is carried to all. Hanging the flags in high places, especially those with frequent or powerful winds, is considered to be especially effective.

Lately I find myself struggling with the ideas of compassion, strength, wisdom and peace. How to find them within myself, and how to help spread them throughout the world. It seems to me that all of us could use more of each. I am acutely aware of the struggle within myself to overcome the base impulses that led me away from those four elements. I see and hear what is happening in the world and am saddened but also amazed at the feelings created within my head and heart.

I have written "flying some prayer flags for you on the Everest of my mind" quite often in my correspondence with my friends and acquaintances over the interwebs. I don't recall the first time I used those words, but I do recall thinking I was quite clever in my turn of phrase. It has not been until recently that it occurred to me it was more than triteness meant to convey solidarity or sympathy. I mean, it is that, but has also become much more to me.

I know now that I will almost certainly never climb Mount Everest, or even venture into the foothills of that majestic, legendary mountain. My life path and circumstances will most likely not allow it. At one time, that notion made me very sad; I don't have to climb it, but I would love to at least see it with my own two eyes, breathe the cold crystalline air sweeping down it flanks.

At the same time, I know that I may never get to see some of the dear people I consider to be my friends of the electronic age, as much as the notion pains me. This does not stop me from wishing them love, peace, and good fortune in whatever life is serving up to them. So if I can't get to the mountain, I will bring the mountain to me.

The space within my mind may be infinite if I wish it so. I could build cities marching to the horizon, oceans unbounded or invisible forests if I so desired. But with all that is going on in our lives, dear ones, I have chosen to create a shield against the negative energy that threatens us. I am forcing up a mountain range from the tectonic plates of my soul, the anchor of which is this Everest I think has grown from my heart.

It fits there, in the space behind my eyes, a stereo vision overlay on the shared hallucination that is our world. The winds blow strong and swift in the crystalline cerulean sky around the Everest I see. The flanks of the mountain are dotted with bits of bright fabric, seeming almost alive as the flags I have hung for you swirl in their eager arabesques and tarantellas and tangos upon the wind.

Lately my heart has grown weary of the hardness and stone of its typical existence. There are cracks, like those of a shell surrounding a chick. My heart is trying to break out so as to share in this world...to share with you, my fellow humans. In the foothills, I kneel and turn my gaze toward the mountain. In my hands are lung ta, inscribed with prayers and the names of those I know and those I wish to know.

The shadows hang blue upon the valley, dear ones. I fly my flags in the wind. May they bring you compassion, strength, wisdom and peace.

The Truth About the Shutter

August 22, 2012. 8:29 PM. An afternoon in the sun has left me with a headache, photos and questions. Overall, not bad.

The questions started almost immediately upon arising this morning. Well, maybe not questions exactly, so much as whispers. What do I need to do? What am I going to do? Perhaps critically, what do I want to do?

Those questions were not to be answered in the morning, not with a shower to be taken and breakfast to be made and eaten. It is that initial rush of activity that I have so much trouble initiating yet paradoxically it makes me feel so much calmer to get them done. It is a quirk of mine that I usually feel a free-floating anxiousness until I shower. The day just does not seem to get off the ground until that happens. Consequently, the later in the morning that I take a shower, the longer I feel antsy.

I really should put that aside.

But it was done. Then it was a few minor life management activities interlaced with a wee bit much of web-surfing. The drawback to that crow mind I have. Next thing I knew it was lunch time. Crept up on me again, damn it.

Even lunch could not remove that vague disquiet I felt. I ate alone, chewing and thinking, trying to put my finger on that thing that seemed to be gnawing at me. No dice. I took a short nap, thinking I was just fatigued. While I was refreshed, I still felt like I was missing something.

The cameras decided for me. Two in a bag on the floor, one sitting on the shelf nearby, two rolls of film and a blank memory card. I stared at the bags for a few minutes, restlessly shifting my feet while chewing my bottom lip. The sun tracked across the floor.

That was it. I needed to be outside, looking through the lens or the viewfinder, chasing the light, diving into shadow. I scooped up the bags and headed out to my car. While driving into the city I felt my gut unwinding. The stiffness left my shoulders. I parked at the River Market and geared up.

Man, it felt good. A nearby trail takes me across the railroad tracks and down along the Missouri. The light was good, big blue bowl of sky with just the right amount of clouds. Hot day, but breezy. The air was humming with the sound of trains and birds. All I had to do was look, point and snap.

The truth was clear. The shutter gives me a raison d'etre, if I may be so indulgent as to say. Well, one of many raisons, this fascination with light and shadow and the capturing thereof. Like writing, the pursuit of truth as I see it through the lens is vital and necessary to my general well-being. 

I may never achieve artistic or commercial success by fulfilling this need of mine. But that is not the point my gut was trying to make. It was telling me to get out there and catch myself in the light and shadows. This is the truth of the shutter.

Grit

Pardon, pardon, dear readers. A brief hiatus for me whilst on a week's vacation, a post for another time. I'll get back into the swing of things, I'm sure. Tonight I had some observations which would not wait, meditations on Olympic sport and the limits of human capability.

I caught the semifinals of the men's 400m tonight. It is significant because lane 5 was occupied by Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee runner from South Africa with blades instead of legs, below the knees. Anyone who has paid attention knows most of his story, so I won't repeat that here. Suffice to say, I was fascinated by the sight of this man who is not quite like many men, running as fast as he can on prosthetics, in the premier sporting event of human history.

I wanted him to win, but alas, he did not. He finished last and approximately two seconds behind the man who did win, Kirani James of Grenada. I was disappointed, but not overly affected. I was about to turn away, thinking of other things when something amazing happened that put a lump in my throat.

Kirani James, a man possessed of "regular" legs,  asked Oscar Pistorius to trade name cards. The sight of them exchanging the papers and a hug put small tears in my eyes.

I stayed put, entranced by the sight of this man who has had no lower legs since he was a child, yet got it in his head that he was going to run. Run, not just like the rest of us. But run against the fastest people in the world. I thought, "This is a man with grit. With steel."

That he did not win is not the most important thing to take away from this race. At least not for us regular mortals. The thing I will remember is that I must stop thinking I can't run with the best, something that will certainly be true if I don't even try.

I should run. We should run. There is no way for us to know how good we can be if we don't cast aside the things we fear will hold us back. We should all be Oscar Pistorius...and run, no matter what.

The Spice Merchant's Apprentice

July 24th, 2012. 8:21 PM. The fatigue of honest effort drives the typing.

A funny thing happened to me today after I arose from bed and made myself presentable to the world.

I put in a full work day today. Actual job-type work. It was enlightening. Enjoyable, even.

I know, I am as surprised as you are, if not more so. To be sure, it isn't full-time. It isn't in architecture or construction. It isn't in a field for which I have any real experience and certainly no training. In fact, it is a line of work in which I ever pictured myself engaged. Those of you know me well enough would know why.

It is in retail. Specifically, a store* that sells herbs, spices and seasonings as their raison d'etre. I like to think of it as, for lack of a better description, an apprentice spice merchant. Did I mention it is retail?

Shocked? I'm still a little stunned myself.

I fell into it by happenstance. I was up to my neck in a job search related to my architecture credentials, and as my mind was wont to do, it flitted off on a tangent regarding a seasoning I was out of at home. My crow-mind couldn't resist going after that mental shiny thing, so I went the company website to look it up. I am fortunate that there is a local outlet of the company near to my house, so I knew it would be easy to get there and get what I needed.

So I'm looking over the page and I notice they have a "Careers" tab. I thought "What the heck?" and I clicked on it to scroll down the list. Lo and behold, the local store was in need of a part-time staffer. I stared at the ad for a few moments, for a split-second thinking I should do it, then clicked away. Me, retail? The thought boggled the mind.

But it kept nagging at me. The idea wouldn't let me go. I considered my position, the long search I've been on and still...nothing.** I thought about all the time I've spent staring out the window after my job hunt activities have burned out for the day. I considered that it would nice to have something constructive to do, earn a little money, while I am slowly stitching my professional life back together.

I considered that I like spices. I like using them. I like reading about them, smelling them, and especially eating them. Somehow that overrode all my anxieties and misgivings about selling things and interacting with the general public on a regular basis. Again, anyone who knows me knows that sort of thing gives me a case of the yammering fantods just thinking about it. It is so far outside my comfort zone as to be in another galaxy.

So what did I do? I dropped off an application. Then I hyperventilated into a paper bag.

I had two interviews, one with the corporate office, one with the store manager. The whole time I felt like I was standing a few feet away from myself, wondering "Who is this man?". I had a hard time believing I was going through with it. This is not something I've done before. There would be things to learn.

So, as it turns out, they really liked me, I liked them, so when they offered, I said yes. Then I hyperventilated into a paper bag.*** The result is that today was my first day on in the spice biz.

I have to say it ended up being much more enjoyable than I could have imagined. It was a slow day, according to the manager and the co-worker with me, so I know it won't always be so pleasant. Aside from the slight awkwardness I felt (and always feel in similar situations) when warming up to the customers and new tasks, I daresay I even enjoyed it. And for the third time, those who know me I have some issues when it comes to dealing with a stream of people all day long. But you know what? I exceeded my expectations. That felt pretty darn good.

So there you have it, dear readers. Another step on the path, where it is headed I don't have a clear idea. For now, though, I'll keep on walking and see what turns up. You never know until you try, right?

---

*It is a spice company with stores nationwide, about 70 or so, I think. I may have mentioned them in past posts, but in regards to naming names, I'm a little unsure what journalistic protocols might apply now that I am an employee.
**To be accurate, the job climate in architecture has started to pick up a little around my region. It is still a slow awakening, and things are not moving very fast. There have been nibbles. But that is a post for another time...
***Okay, so I didn't hyperventilate into a paper bag. But I did put my head down between my knees and take long, slow breaths for a minute or two.

Through Which Roars the River

It was a few days ago at breakfast that the white hole opened up in the center of my mind to pour forth a new light of wonder into my dormant heart. Across from me sat Love; I walked over that bridge Einstein had created for me and into a new creation. The river gushed forth to sweep me away. I was near speechless, on the verge of tears of joy. Love in all its glory seized me by the heart and refused to let go.

That river of the mind found its temporal twin today, under a sky of pure cerulean punctuated by the commas of swallows swooping through the air. It was pressure in my mind and heart that pushed me out of my new home with cameras in hand. The pressure, the call to find some water, or train tracks or something like them. I found my way down to the banks of the Missouri river where it flows past downtown Kansas City.

It was there that the great blue and the breeze and the slow dance of the river made it clear to me that change is inevitable and often necessary, ever the more so in the case of finding peace within ourselves and love without. It is up to us to guide that change where possible, and go with it when it is ever so larger than our hearts.

The Missouri showed me this. Mighty bridges cross it. Its banks have been shaped by the hands of man. There are gates and valves, sluices and levees placed in an effort to manage cosmic uncertainty as manifested by water. On a peaceful day, under a bright blue sky, in the company of the occasional branch floating lazily along one might be tempted to believe that this placid river could not possibly ever be out of control.

But look closer. Look at the marks on the riverbanks. The driftwood here, the odd bit of flotsam there. See the rusty barrel five feet above the water line, the faint red paint set off against sun-dried silt baked to the color of pewter in the Midwestern sun. It is then that the old high water marks make themselves known. The depth gauges painted on the piers of the bridges suddenly come into focus. They look worn. They look used. Obviously, something swift and fierce has passed this way.

That swift and fierce thing swept over me again today, out there in the sun. I stood still, camera poised to capture an elaborate combination of light and shadow that had caught my eye. The instant the shutter clicked I flashed back to that morning at the breakfast table, across from Love, and the switch flicked in my heart. The white hole opened up to pour forth its energy of creation and it spilled down into my heart there on the banks of the Missouri, flowing down the levee and into the water, the circuit, it closed and the energy of the earth, the sun, the river, the Universe it poured back into a thousand fold, I knew it, I knew it there and then, I felt its majesty, I felt love all around me with my feet on the ground and my head in the sky and my heart in the hands of another, knowing beyond a shadow of all my doubts that we must tear down the dams we build in the rivers of our heart, risking the flood for the fullness of being…

…We must, dear ones. We must undam the rivers of heart-space-time to let them burst forth and carry us to where we can find that which gives us life, that which makes us human. Embrace the singularity. Cross your own event horizons. Come out the other side and into Love.

903 Views Of Mt. Gumbo

Following my own "narrow road to the deep north"*, through the countryside of my mind...

This is a time of particular reflection, as I contemplate change in my life, and a path that unfolds a step at a time. The jottings here have mapped out parts of the peculiar terrain of my mind. I have been unable to shake the notion put forth in the work of Japanese artist Hokusai, in his famous series of woodblock prints 36 Views of Mount Fuji. The art being a manifestation of explorations into a central idea, I realized that I have been engaging in the same thing with words.

The problem is I am still chasing Mount Fuji.

My nine-hundred and third post. 903 different maps in just over three-and-a-half years of journeying. I'm still looking for that point about which this world of mine revolves. My own personal axis mundi. Perhaps it is there. There have been glimpses. Sometimes the fog burns off and I can just see something there, something that might be a mountain, a tree, a post the size of Fuji.

I don't know. Ideas are funny that way. Our heads are full of them, universes contained in the perimeter of our minds. I have many. What I don't know is the one that functions as the anchor of my internal universe, and by extension, my external universe. I've come close, at times, I think. Lately "Love" seems to be central to the mental eructations I call my writing. You, dear readers, may better able to tell me.

Gripping smoke. Herding cats. Embracing a waterfall. The tasks I set for myself, because if I have learned anything from writing, getting a handle on truth, authenticity, and the "real" means chasing something I may never fully grasp. Yet something keeps me on the path, searching for that one view in my head that finally makes me say "I have seen the mountain".

I will see it. I know it. All I need to do is keep looking.

---
*The Narrow Road to the Deep North (and Other Travel Sketches), by Matsuo Basho, is a book I would love to write for today, and one I wish I had written.

Bowing My Head, Saying Hey-Men!

Sunday, March 11, 8:50 PM. Spring night, cool breeze, calm heart.

Unplugged a little bit this evening. Paid attention to what I was eating tonight, instead of the computer screen. It makes a big difference in the quality of the meal, I can tell you. There is something to this practice of mindfulness I have been ruminating on as of late.

Mindfulness.  I paid attention to the grains of rice in my bowl, the flecks of parsley in the gumbo, the savor of shrimp on my tongue and between my teeth.  Time slowed down. The house breathed around me.

As the spoon gathered up the last goodness in the bowl, uncovering the bottom of white porcelain flecked with green bits of herbs, I had a quiet revelation. In the here and now, I am humbly grateful for two things (not the only things, to be sure) in my life: good gumbo and deep love.

In the midst of the storms of my life, gumbo nourishes my body, and love...my friends, Love it is that nourishes my soul.  Between the two of them, especially love, I believe I am going to be well fed in this life.

It's good, that's all there is to it.

Travelling Riverside (Un)Blues: Meditation

"God expects spiritual fruit, not religious nuts."
-Church sign, Highway 17, somewhere near Tappahannock, Virginia

Heading north on Highway 17, through the Middle Neck region of the state of my birth.  It is a gray day, fog and mist making the world seem like the inside of a back lit oyster shell.  The Wee Lass and I are on our way back to my adopted state of Maryland after a long weekend visiting with her grandparents in the southeast part of Virginia.  She was sleeping when I drove past the sign with that quote on it.  My chuckle didn't wake her up.

I was dreaming, too, but wide awake and on matters entirely different from hers.

The gray gauze that wrapped the countryside made it a day fit for dreaming.  The road was sparsely populated, and the car seemed a cocoon and not a machine.  Long stretches of nacreous light with trees fading into view like ents or spirits. The quiet in the car led me to a long meditation on blood ties, family, God and what it means.  We seemed less on the road than in space somewhere between the stars.

The road out there plays a bit of a sine wave with the Rappahannock River.  It veers away, then close, but for a while you can always tell it is there. There are subtle shifts in light and vegetation that let you know the river exists.  There is a presence of this long silver rope that has touched so many, given some a way of life, and many sustenance.  The river exists and we flow along with it.

In my mind the river and my family were merging, becoming blurry, as I glanced in the rear view at my daughter sleeping; this visit was particularly important because my blessed mother has been ailing quite a bit in the past couple of months.  There was scary episode (scary because it was life-threatening) last month, and there are complications because it happened on the heels of another serious condition which is still causing trouble.  It has been the sort of trying times that would make anyone reach out and want to have close as much love as possible, because love is what keeps us afloat, sometimes, on this river we call life.

In that gray blanket of fog and humming tires I recalled the laughter of my daughter and my mother as they played together in the living room of the home of my youth.  That laughter, and the banter, I could hear it as I was in the kitchen on Sunday making dinner for us.  That laughter was a tonic, a salve to make a sore heart a soaring heart.  It pushed back the great gray wall of melancholy that hovered just outside the limits of direct perception.  I could hear the life that was flooding back into my mother's weary voice, see the smile on her face and know that the life I helped bring into this world would not have been possible without the life that brought me into this world.

The tires hummed.  The mist swirled.  My daughter slept, her angel face pressed up against the side of the booster seat. She may not have known, maybe did not understand the vitality she brought to her grandmother.  But I did. I saw my future and my past come together in a brilliant Now, one that made my heart sing and throb to know that my family was blessed to be together, right then.

The gray sky and dripping trees passed by in a dreamy blur.  I swallowed some tears and smiled.  I had looked at my daughter and my mother, seeing joy on the faces of youth and wisdom.  The taste of bittersweet candy rolled around in my mouth. There was a lightening of the sky as I came to understand that stories begin and stories end, but we are blessed to have stories to tell.  This is a story, written in joy with the ink of Love upon our hearts. I looked out the window at the river just through the trees. I was convinced then that the world is not so gray a place as had I let myself believe, by the mighty silver river of love flowing through my heart.

Million In Me

Million different people
from one day to the next
is me in winter

--
inspired by The Verve
Thanks, you guys...

Sunday Meditation #12: Christmas Threads and Contradictions

An odd run-up to this, my forty-seventh Christmas on Earth.  Alone in my house two days ago, chuckling at my own weirdness as I stood in bar of sunlight, a copy of A Year With Thomas Merton in my hands, and the supercharged chant of Rollins' Band "Shine" shaking the walls a little as I read.  How this came to be I cannot recall.  I do know that at the time, it made perfect sense.

I have been reading the Merton book since June, which is the month in which I acquired it.  The short daily meditations I mostly read at the pace of one a day, in sync with the calendar.  Time and circumstance conspired to disturb the symmetry of that schedule.  Lately I have the habit of neglecting the book for days at a time, then catch up in a concentrated burst of reading when I have time.  So it was this time.

"In The End, Grace Alone" the title of Merton's meditation.  Henry Rollins exhorts me to "Shine" as I read it.  I lean against the door frame and grin.  This time the apparent cognitive dissonance of the ideas before my mind does not bother me.  Merton writes of his frustration with being an intellectual in a land of "businessmen and squares", while Rollins practically boots me in the ass to be a hero.  It is to laugh, and I do.

Truly it does not bother me, these two ends of the tug rope.  I've lived with the bifurcation of my interior life for so long it seems normal.  I feel like a warrior-poet, except I cannot squarely identify my foe or my muse.  I very often, in the words of Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame), "obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul".  These exhortations I have trouble explaining to myself, much less to others.

Yet I listen.  I savor.  I worry them with the teeth of my mind.  Somewhere on there exists my destination.

The season and in particular, this day, always place me in this frame of mind.  A season of merriment and good will towards humankind marred by either too much belief or not enough.  By some lights it isn't enough that you be kindly disposed to those around you, you must be Christian and you have to believe.  Never mind all the ironies involved in the chauvinistic demands for "keeping Christ in Christmas" when Christmas itself was taken over from a pagan holiday and has been further hijacked by a consumer-driven, free market (arguably) capitalistic and money-driven culture.  No wonder this time of year produces so much anxiety in so many.

There seems to be little real peace, and true love.  For better or worse, Christmas as a season and a holiday has been dilated too much by the demands of an open society for the 'at-large' return to a ritual acknowledgment of the birth of Jesus Christ.  To do so would be to ignore entire segments of our society, and would not be allowed by the money machines of consumer capitalism because it would cut down on the profit pool.  From what I see in the news, it is either about mass consumption or religious narrow-mindedness.  Hardly anyone speaks of peace, at least, not in a pure sense.

For myself, I want peace of mind.  I want the simple joy to be found in caring for those around you and in the communion with life in the universe.  I do not want to be wrapped up in questions of salvation versus damnation, belief versus non-belief, extravagant consumption in the face of need.  The former question misses the point of personal faith, and the latter question is one that exists independently of any holiday.  Neither is a question to be solved if this is supposed to be a matter of peace and love.

Thomas Merton and Henry Rollins: the yin and yang of my Christmas season.  They both speak to me, in different tongues.  The thinker and the warrior tell me to seek inner peace, but I will have to fight for it.  This makes me laugh. Salvation and consumption both seem to me to be missing the main point: that we should exist in love and seek peace in ourselves so that we may know it with others.

As I meditate on my roots this Christmas, I feel I am closer to casting aside the distractions and noise of this world, and getting much closer to love and to peace.  This is my wish for us all.

Sunday Meditation #10: Bellum Terra

Slightly troubled thoughts today, while completing chores and contemplating the world in which I live.  I have experienced unease and discord in disconcerting amounts, not by design but by circumstance.  A side effect, perhaps, of too much television and Internet.  The world is an unsettled place and it seeps in if we are not careful.

I considered this in my own mind, as I barked a curse at an inattentive driver today on the road.  I was running an errand on my way to lunch.  Hunger and impatience getting the best of me.  The temper flared and I said something that induced in me mild regret.  I know better that what I do, sometimes, yet I have been unable to entirely refrain from anger, spite, and irritation at my fellow humans.

Amusing, perhaps.  That ideal behavior is something we expect from pacifists and clergy folk, monks and nuns.  I am far from being any of those exemplars, yet I often expect myself to act as one.  I sometimes actively wish for the patience and beatitude one expects of saints.  Occasionally I manage the trick, if ever so briefly.  The sensation often catches me by surprise.  Alas, my self-awareness of it is the finger touching the soap bubble and POP! it is gone. 

Ah, I am digressing, in my own meditation.  Why does all of this matter?  What is the cause of this discord?  It occurred to me today, after reading too much news and inanity in the Internet, that much of it springs from the feeling that we live in a Land of War, an American bellum Terra.  Aggression is built into our culture, our patriotism, our propriety towards nations and neighbors.  Everything, even the simple act of our daily existence, is framed in terms of war, conflict, and competition.  The prevailing militancy and mean-spiritedness has turned everything into fight for survival, even when it is no such thing.

I meditated today on my own expressions of aggression.  I realized I had allowed the pettiness and selfishness of a few to infect and disrupt my own better nature.  I understood that some of the nameless dissatisfaction and formless irritation I felt was because I let it affect me.  I did something simple to reset my head.

I cut the grass in my yard.

For thirty-five minutes, nothing more was demanded of me than to push, cut, turn, and repeat.  It was a cool morning, and I warmed up quickly as I let myself be taken up by the task.  The working of muscles, the meter of the breathing, the intake of fresh morning air into my lungs:  this integration of mind and body brought me back together much like that moment at which the camera lens spins into focus, and the image is sharp before the eye.  I needed the physical action to knock my mental actions back onto a better track.

When I was done, I returned indoors and rested a bit.  My gut had relaxed, my mind was no longer roiled.  I felt a slight pang of shame in that I had allowed the world at large to pull me away from my better nature.  But I also felt so much better that I was able to come back.  The world, and the people in it, can make you mean, to be sure.  As to myself, lesson learned.  Serenity takes work, too, and it does not pay to let the selfish, the hateful, and the uncaring dictate the course of our actions.

I will never be a saint.  This is okay, I don't want to be a saint.  What I do want is to be a placidis hominum, (peaceful human) to those I love and those I meet.  In the land of war, peace is water for thirsty soil, and I have much to grow.

Rebirth of the Shaman

Crouched on cold mesa,
Shaman smiles, sun rising on
forty-six winters

Glistening Edges

So you may have guessed by now, I haven't felt much like writing lately.  A few random bursts here in October, plus some handwritten stuff in my little black notebooks (for me, not thee, at this time) and in a new journal I'm keeping.  The streak is over, too, last entry for my More Than A Year Of Daily Writing went up on October 8th.  Officially I topped out at 375 straight days of posting.  Not sure how I managed that.

But mostly, I haven't felt the ambition to write.  Most of the ideas I've had I decide really weren't that blog-worthy, and for the remainder I haven had little energy to pursue them.  I have been too tired to return replies, as my poor record with responses to everyone will indicate.  It's because of the "cold black space with the glistening edges"* that has broken open my personal space-time continuum: getting laid off, the subsequent job search and the attendant money crisis created thereby.

This particular black space has not taken complete control of my life, but its presence is sucking up a lot of energy and attention.  It makes me tired.  I have to crank up the personal PR machine, again, start "rebranding" myself again, and it inflicts upon me great vexation.

I know I am capable, and smart, and good at what I do.  I'm also tired of having to explain that over and over.  It's draining and does no good for my morale.  Fighting for balance and security so frequently, well, that is no way to live a life.  I am not really a magician, and my hat may be out of rabbits.

The upside is I have people who love me, who care about me and are helping me in ways practical and spiritual.  I truly would not be able to sustain myself without their help.  I am grateful for the support, emotionally and otherwise. There are other things I am grateful for, too, including the many readers I have here on Irish Gumbo, and I may write a little more about that stuff later.

For now, I'm going to get some rest, and say thanks to all those who believe in me.  Thank you.

---

*Bonus points and a Gumbo high five if you can tell me the song from which that lyric was taken, and the band.

Walls Within

An ordinary Tuesday night, and I was mildly bent out of shape over a snippet of douchebaggery I heard about on the news.  By now you've probably heard about the mental belch emitted by Hank Williams, Jr. regarding his idiotic and odious comparison of Barack Obama to Hitler.  Please note he said he was sorry that the remark offended some people.  He didn't say he was sorry to have said it in the first place.

Anyway.  This irritation I was feeling threatened to ruin my evening so I pushed myself to think of something else, something more constructive.  So I got to thinking about walls.

Walls.  The walls we build around ourselves, the ones we build around our hearts and in our minds.  To protect and to defend, to keep out the hurt.  And which can inadvertently keep out the help.

So as I cooled off and backed away from the rant that was forming in my head, I mused a little more on the walls I'm tearing down and the bridges I will build out of the fortress of my heart.  I wondered what it takes to truly overcome the bricks and stones of our souls, and how we return ourselves to the world.

I wondered, how will you tear down your walls, so I can see the true and wonderful you?

Ruben Finally Gets It

Raised blade against stubble
for the last time, he thought,
just like last time
agates of his eyes tracking
a leather mask, the map
of himself marked by rivers
in canyons carved by her

Blade scrapes the land
flattening hills and opening wells,
tungsten glare illuminating
the broken heart behind the eyes
that realized in all those years
of wanting to shave for her
she never once deigned to ask

The Tao of Harrison

I owe a very special thanks to my good friend Rich, who writes a column called 'Popular Forensics' over at Open Case .com, for giving me directions that lead to the following quote:

Shortly after Dave killed himself, I reread “How Men Pray,” and I remember wondering whether, in the midst of Dave’s torment, he might have found consoling Harrison’s belief that a writer is someone who “consciously or unconsciously takes a vow of obedience to awareness.” Perhaps he would have smiled at Harrison’s belief that the writer’s gift, and curse, is one of “excessive consciousness.”

It is from an article in OutsideOnline, written by Tom Bissell about one of my favorite authors, Jim Harrison.  The article is longish for online material, but its very good.  I recommend it for the curious.  I don't often buy into coincidence, but that last phrase of "excessive consciousness" made my jaw drop.

I read that, and for a few moments, I truly believed that I might, after all, truly be a writer.