Knockaround Boys, Part II

So. This love for the broken world has me in its grip.

Things are so exquisite.

I listened to this podcast on Radio Lab about these punk rock kids in Cuba in the late eighties, early nineties, who began injecting themselves with blood from people who were infected with HIV. The Cuban government kept all these HIV infected patients in a kind of isolation ward- but while there, they could play their rock music, grow their hair long, and live in this strange kind of imprisoned freedom. Then, of course, they’d die these terrible deaths.

The whole thing made me fill up with light on the inside and weep.

I drove past the low rolling hills north of Cayucos and the fog was in and the grasses were tall and brown and the sea was dark and ribboned with stark, white foam and cattle were scattered along the hillside and the whole world was blown through with this brilliant, diffuse light and this made me tear up and the blood filled my heart and overflowed, ran onto the floorboards of my car and sloshed around.

Yesterday’s walk on the beach was enough to kill me with simple joy.

I have some sad memories of this particular beach and that sadness tinged the edges of my joy and gave me the exactly perfect emotion, the one I cherish above all others, the one I’m such a sucker for. In the waves was the spirit of Yemaya, the great mother who lives in the sea and whose child I am, and, you know, I could feel her. I could hear her voice in my heart. And up on the beach behind me somewhere are the bones of our beloved Raj, our old dog, and I could feel her and see her so vividly. And I walked the edges of the sea between these two spirits and the whole earth blew its breath through me, through my own vaporous spirit, and there was this great boundarylessness, this limitless interpenetration, that made me weep.

Humans of New York. I weep every single time I go visit that site. Go there now, see if you can keep a dry eye. I dare you.

I’ve been watching this BBC show, One Life, narrated by David Attenborough. Now, to be fair, just the sound of his voice makes me weepy. So.

But that show is just murdering me.

You look at the natural world through the eyes of that show and you’ll be undone. Or you’re made of stone, I don’t know. How can these things be? And we just walk around with our heads up our asses, complaining about our Starbucks order.

When there is this illumined mad gorgeous beauty all around us!

Maybe I’m having some kind of mental breakdown. I’m all peeled open. And when I say “I”, I don’t mean that to say that there is an I experiencing all of this. It feels almost as if I’m a window that is also kind of a mirror, and everything blows through me unimpeded, as if there’s just this opening where I used to be, and if I look within there’s just the reflection of what’s out there, looking back at me.

And what about love? All this love. For The Woman on the Verge. You know, a whole new universe of love that had lain undiscovered in us, despite our love. Like the Hubble Deep Field images- what you thought might be a faint star turns out to be a whole galaxy- and there are thousands and thousands of them in this tiny speck of our darkest, emptiest patch of night sky.

Love is infinite and nested, complex and emergent.

As is life itself.

As are you.

As are we all.

***

So of course I weep.

***

Namaste.

***