Life Contracts and Death is Expected

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When you are in the wilderness, the first thing is to admit it.

Do not go about in denial.

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In a wasteland, there are yet landmarks. Overhead is the sun, in its various angles, now high and small and hot, now low and large and tending toward cool or beginning to warm.

And there are spindrels of stone on the horizon, and a valley off somewheres and a low tree or a rock like a family huddled under a hail of fire.

There may yet be clouds on the horizon. There may be birds, according to their kinds.

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Needless to say, there is danger all around, but it is insensate. It is impartial. And being impartial, it lacks all remorse. 

For remorse is a human thing, and it can find no purchase here.

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What is called for is finding shade when the sun is high, and seeking moisture in the low places, and above all doing only that which is compelled. 

Leaving off what is no longer useful. 

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Also, taking stock of supplies. Conserving same. 

Requiring of the mind a certain discipline. 

And recognizing the beckoning lights on the horizon as mirages, for there is only more desert and no oasis there. 

No sweet water nor date palms nor rest to be had.

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Do not get me wrong. This place is where I have come to with my own two legs walking and my eyes open and mostly clear. Some days the wheel turns and lifts you up to the heavens and then it yet turns and you are cast down low with the low creatures, with the snakes and the crawling things in the dirt and the foul places and this, too, is meant to be.

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This is holy.

This is holy.

This is holy.

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So my prayer is this: let me be awake. Let me cast my eyes upon it and let me see it. Give me the strength to look and not to refrain from it. Give me the strength to say to this also, ‘yes’. 

Yes.

And again, yes.

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My small suffering turns my eyes to real suffering which does not cease upon this earth. My small suffering opens my heart to suffering which cannot be bounded, which cannot be explained but only endured. Though it be unendurable. Though it be without end. 

This too, this too.

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My prayer for all of us is that suffering may be ameliorated by lovingkindness and right understanding and right acts. Baring that, may those who suffer be comforted, no matter what or why. 

Peace be upon them.

And also on you.

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I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

-Wallace Stevens

 Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird

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I Am No Little Angel, Nor Have I Wings to Fly

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So, these emotions.

They tell me I am ruined. They tell me my child is ruined. They tell me the world is ruined.

Ruination. 

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Nor is there goodness. Nor succor. 

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Present moment awareness. They say it’s key. Also, breathing. Also, not killing everyone. Or at least those you want most to kill. I am bitter as a blue ruin. There are snakes everywhere and poor rations. When the ones for whom you strive disdain you it is a cold weather. When your best efforts are for naught and worse, and worse.

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This past week I have done things I had no business doing. I got away with them but still. There is when provoked in me a great and terrible thing. I would say that these things were required, necessary. 

There is within me a force that should not be set loose upon the world.

For all my gentle lovingkindness, there is a beast that hungers and is blind with fury.

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We already have the answer we seek.

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Some dark things you look into, and recoil from. Some you embrace. Some you hunger for. Some you repudiate.

But you will feast upon the darkness as the light. 

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With one hand you bail out the craft and with the other you chop at the hull with your axe.

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Singing and weeping all the while. 

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As the storm rages.

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As sharks thrash in the shallows.

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I am no little angel, nor have I wings to fly.

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Namaste, for what that may be worth.

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wrecked

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So, things are bad here. I won’t go into specifics, but we’re all upside down, or wandering around dazed and bloody, looking for our shoe or trying to remember something important that’s right on the tip of our tongue.

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Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

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And it’s okay. Another opportunity to learn. A chance to sit with fear and sadness and guilt and shame and loss and not to turn from it. 

Breathe.

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And again.

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Still alive.

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How in the midst of this the sun still shines. How the simple touch of my wife’s hand calms the hand on the tiller. How there is beauty in all things. 

How in the eye of the storm there is calm. 

A heightened sense of everything.

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Ah, but we are sad, sad.

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I will take my bowl and drain it to the dregs. 

In deep gratitude for this, too.

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May we all be at peace.

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Domestic Interior

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Ah, me. 

I don’t know what to do.  

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Trust, faith, love, betrayal, ego, fear, clinging, stupidity, anger, loss, longing. 

I got the whole enchilada.

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In other news, the Large Hadron Collider seems to be up and running. But it’s only running proton streams in one direction.

No collisions that way.

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We always get sucked back in to the human drama. We are hungry for it. I am hungry for it. I want to be loved. I want to be understood and held blameless.

but who is blameless among us?

Not I.

Perhaps the more blameworthy we are, the more we seek not to be held accountable.

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I had this lecture with my kid today, how there’s no escape from the consequences of our bad acts. How it doesn’t matter if the universe “catches” you doing wrong. If you don’t get ‘caught’, you still don’t get away with anything. 

The whole universe conspires to help you learn this lesson.

Physician, heal thyself. 

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I’m full of good advice.

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and shit.

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ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego. me me me me me me me.

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Same old story.

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Love is the answer. Love is the default position. 

Ah, but I am in a foul mood, and would turn my face from the light and curse.

And curse.

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All Structures are Unstable

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So this idea of reincarnation. I was talking with my wife while we were driving back from Cayucos this morning, and we were discussing Eckhart Tolle’s idea, or his expression of the idea, that ego is responsible for the lions share of our suffering. The ego, unsure of its position and stability, constantly struggles to make itself feel important and stable and real, usually by amassing wealth or fame or power, or by gossiping about others to make itself feel better by comparison, etc. 

So I was thinking about that in a kind of background way and also running a simultaneous track on the whole geologic, vast, universal time frame, just mulling about the fourteen billion years or whatever it’s been since the big bang, and how our arrival was just about a millisecond ago in that kind of mess of time, and it struck me in a visceral kind of way that there is just no fucking way that we are anywhere near the point. I mean, we as a species. 

Can you picture God just hanging out for that fourteen billion years, waiting? Opening the oven door and peeking in every few million years, wondering 

“Is it ready yet? Are my little humans cooked up?” 

“Ah, shit. Still just microbes. Better give it another fifty or sixty million. Maybe I should turn it up to 350.”

I don’t think so. 

It seems like we are just an interesting side effect, or product, of this little evolutionary machine that keeps on spinning the DNA wheel and seeing what comes up. 

A point, if you will, but hardly the point.

So, that dispenses with the idea of a special soul, a special purpose for humanity. We’re just an interesting biological process, with the odd side-effect of consciousness. The consciousness is a really cool, really interesting effect of rolling the genetic dice over and over again for four billion years. But so are feathers. The much-touted eye, that would have everyone believing in a “creator” to make such a magnificent machine.

And then I thought, well, what about your buddhist idea of reincarnation? Isn’t that, at least in a western conception, dependent upon a soul to be reborn again and again? To carry those karmic seeds?

Not really, I reminded myself. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying lays it out for us- there is no continuation of the specific individual in any way after death. It’s a more general thing. It’s not ego specific. 

And then I realized that in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic tradition, there is an afterlife just for the ego.

That’s the whole point for those religions. That’s why you get seventy-two virgins. A halo and wings. Streets paved with gold. A seat right next to God.

It’s all just more food for the ego.

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The ego is what we must jettison if we are to evolve.

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What I let it all go with was the idea that we are not nature’s only experiment with consciousness.

Just the first one.

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Like a clumsy prototype.

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There’s bound to be someone that can do better with it than we have managed so far.

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Peace to you. 

Make pain your teacher, and you will not live in ignorance.

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Also, today my seventeen year old daughter got a call from a friend of hers whose parents were dealing with an emergency. She gets us to buy a bunch of food so she can take it over to them. 

She’s over there now cleaning the house, tending to the kids, and fixing dinner.

Our little bodhi-satva.

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Namaste.

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A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou

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Fucking food.

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This picture is of some honey roasted carrots with a mess of garlicky collards. I made this a couple of weeks ago.

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Yesterday I made a flourless chocolate cake from a bread and honey recipe for the kid’s birthday.

Today I’m making their Pear Butter Cake.

Soon I will weigh four hundred pounds and it will be worth it.

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Dinner tonight is roasted beets and carrots with cumin vinaigrette, chickpea puree and flatbread, plus a mess of pork chops with corriander-cumin-garlic spice rub. 

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All I want to do is rub food all over my body. And my wife’s body.

And get drunk and eat it all. 

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Here comes the sun, little darlin’.

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