Fissures

There are these cracks along the right side of my skull-- raised, grooved canyons running from above my right ear to above the right side of my forehead. I have some mild imperfections on other parts of my head and a light scar under one of my eyebrows as well, but these ones are big (in comparison).

I remember some vague explanation from my father about a "tricycle" and a "car," but the explanation for these features is lost in time. However, as my hairline recedes and my age increases these small flaws have become more and more evident.

I wonder how many stories we carry around, written into our skin and bones-- maybe etched chemically into our nerves or other tissue-- that really belong to someone else? The events happened to us, but they are not ours. We are just the book on which they are written.

Someone else has the guilt, the knowledge, the text of the story, but they keep it on a private shelf-- hidden. Part of us knows that the story is there, but the gap left by its absence can never be filled.

We are told it doesn't matter.

I am sure they are correct.

All the accidents of fate that lead to our existence-- the family bible thrown on the fire, the friend with an ex-girlfriend in Kansas, the intoxicating smile of the intense girl in the youth group (eyes burning behind her glasses, the curls of her hair framing her face), the cramped existence in an apartment in a sleepy, coastal town-- these really don't matter. Or they matter most to someone else.

Someone else who wishes to forget them.

The plan, after all, was freedom. Freedom from the expectations of one's parents. Freedom from the constraints of dress. Freedom from the shallowness of the empty, social club religiosity of our youth. Freedom from urban life and its insults to the senses and sensibilities. Freedom to be ourselves and to travel that journey of self-discovery. Freedom to be intoxicated by our own ability to be influenced by and influence others. Freedom to associate in groups and take on their ways or have them take on yours. Freedom to make mistakes along the way.

There was a clear intention: to be happy, to be fulfilled, to experience the warmth of human companionship along the way.

So many things muddled this clarity. So many compromises were made.

Some people speak of making a deal with the devil, but entering into a contract with an angel can be just as constraining. Both require that in some way you make your life about duty and obligation and you part ways with your soul. Your soul is still there, of course (loyal companion)-- it just lives the life of a dog kept out in the cold.

The fact of life is that it forces itself upon us, unbidden. It does not need our permission. It emerges from the cracks in the universe and makes itself real. We are not required to understand.

There is never a point at which our story is our own. It always belongs to someone else. To something else. It is a voice to a universal phonograph-- a needle and a spinning wheel to play someone else's notes.

And as much as we play, we were played. But we resist the forces that shape us and so the music is discordant. We aspire to be more and in doing so we are less. The aspiration never reaches fruition because it is not in its nature to do so. Its nature is to self-perpetuate. It is a solvent, like water. It forms only to transform.

The story of aspiration is not our own. It is the same yearning as that of our ancestors and we are the new aperture through which that light can escape and project itself on the world.

That is what we feel when we are drawn in by necessity to love and attachment and the incessant withdrawals on our time and emotions-- that larger yearning. The aspiration is never concluded. Part of its modus operandi is to give birth to itself again, each time with the illusion of newness. The central lie is "individuality," and yet our individuality is never entirely our own.

In a sense it is infuriating to see some part of ourselves (but not the part that is our own) born in front of us, under our care but out of our control, living free and undermining our own chances to achieve that end goal. It is infuriating to feel some empathy for our parents and how one's own existence must have drained their own sense of control and attainment. Their standards were appropriately high and yet they have no control over the true outcome. The legacy? The surrounding society? The aspirations of their own children? All are dashed on the prow of fate like waves in choppy water. The aspiration of our ancestors took one form and seemed so solid and yet it melted away like a spider's web, like the body of a spider consumed by her young.

The mother's body never satisfies. We always need more.

When accidents intrude to erode our sense of self-control-- horrible accidents-- we are startled to hear their message of impotence. They slice through our sense of self-absorption like shark teeth through the soft hide of a seal and leave us with a gash in our self-importance. Such things are best patched up and forgotten. The lesson they give is so painful and self-contradictory. They spawn visions of possibilities, some of which threaten our view of ourselves as a good person, some of which speak to our pain and regret, some of which wish the noise of the world could just die down and leave us alone. We are challenged in our capacity to absorb, accept and adapt. We are challenged to accept our good fortune as just that-- the best possible outcome-- and not to wish things had turned out differently.

After all, a life change is sometimes easier to deal with if it takes a different form. It depends on how it chooses to arrive as much as what it is. The end of a relationship is so different when based on infidelity as opposed to an irrevocable loss or an unavoidable illness. This is because we live in story-- the story we tell ourselves.

In addition, sometimes accidents begin to seem like they had an underlying intention. Maybe we brought them about unconsciously. Maybe we wanted free, but couldn't admit it to ourselves. Now we have that guilt to carry for the rest of our lives. But as long as no one else knows.... There is the official story and there is the story we tell ourselves. Now our soul is two dogs and they fight each other and both live out in the cold.

And sometimes we pay for our love of life. It is intoxicating to be alive and young and exposed to so many possibilities. We cock the gun and spin the wheel and play the numbers and we are lucky-- so lucky. So what's the problem? She spins the wheel and, "Bam!" The shot reverberates through the rest of our life. There was some fundamental miscalculation about the nature of existence and what factors determine outcomes and their differing weight with differing subjects and so forth... we couldn't have known. That makes it better, right?

Let's try to rewrite this story. Let's start over. Let's go be pioneers in our own existence. Except there is no frontier. The frontier is gone. We have already been there. It was never there to begin with.

The angel's wings will fold over us and hide us from these truths, but even angels grow tired and eventually let down their wings. The mortal sky shines down on us once again.

Okay then-- let's just ignore the cracks. We will not acknowledge the fissures. We will not face the things that have happened, that we may have done or neglected to do. It is our own story after all-- we can claim it and keep it under lock and key.

And all the time our story wanders about the earth, infuriating us with its lack of communication, its defiance of norms and refusal to stay in one place. All the time it never was our own. It belonged to something bigger and it found a way out.

Maybe the fissures in my head tell me that we are all accidents in some sense-- I am fortunate to carry these marks in my skull and be alive. The story they tell is mild compared with many. I have no real deficits to complain about. My story will not finish with me. It will not culminate in anything that I achieve. It is not my own. It is like water and it desires more than anything to create new cracks in this reality, apertures through which it can flow, wheels it can turn and songs it can sing until the song of all humanity is over.

Clarity

Just to be clear:

We are in this moment. Whatever we are doing, whatever we are thinking or being, we are in this moment, where we are alive-- amazingly so. Alive.

We are molecules. All around us are molecules. We are trading molecules constantly. Everything is in motion. This moment we are made of teeming molecular activity of which we are not really aware.

We are cells. All around us are cells. Living things made of cells. Our cells are constantly rebuilding, renewing. We are not the same matter. We are new, moment by moment. Yet we remain the same. We have pounds of little mindless microorganisms in our guts who are also a part of us. We share our being with them. We need them. They are the reason we can eat. They are 70% of our immune system. There are millions of them. They depend on us, we on them. Yet we are not really aware of them. The entire digestive tract from mouth to exit is really *outside* of our body, even though it is contained within our body. These small creatures live next to us, but are contained within us. The nutrients that enter our body are absorbed into our body from this tube that runs through us. The only things that actually enter into our body are broken down into their components. We take those parts, those fragments of cells, those molecules and make them into ourselves. The many single-celled creatures that pass through this existence with us help us accomplish this task. When we were infants, we did not do this. We took nutrients directly into us through the blood in the umbilical cord. Our mother's blood. We were a part of her. We were within her, constructing ourselves. She was constructing us. In some ways we were made of pieces of her-- genetically similar pieces-- and pieces of our father that were made to live within her. In other ways we are made of pieces of our ancestors. Genetic material similar to them, pieces of them, traits and features of them. The mitochondria, in particular (power plants of the cells) were passed down from our maternal line. All the women down that line shared those mitochondria. Mitochondria are also something that lives within us. They are their own thing, with their own RNA, but they live within our cells. Without them, our cells would lack the energy to live. They are similar to chloroplasts in plants. From ancient times, mitochondria established an alliance with cells, to perpetuate themselves by being a part of a larger cell. The cells have DNA of their own. The DNA tells the cells how to make an individual creature, and in each cell of that creature is a mitochondria. Something else that lives in that cell and provides energy so that the rest of the cell's work can occur. So we can exist.

We exist in this moment, but we do not know all that we are-- all the separate impulses toward existence that come together to make us what we are. Alive. In this moment. A continuance of things begun far before us. A blip in the massive arc of time and the manifestation of life in the form of self-replicating cells. Self-replicating elements of cells. So many discrete things come together to make us possible. We are not even dimly aware. We are in this moment. Alive. Amazing, really.

We are on this planet. A planet with the distance from the sun and the atmosphere necessary for our kind of life. A precise planet. A planet just exactly like we needed. A planet teeming with all sorts of life. Mind boggling, intricate, complex, fecund life. Whole classes of living things that have existed and ceased to exist. Previous versions of what we see around us today. Previous versions of us. We are possible because of an amazing synchrony of just the right things at a planetary scale. Outside of this bubble there is space. Cold and airless. Below us is a molten core, teeming with heat and energy. Both capable of squashing our existence. Both held in balance by the thin crust of earth, water and atmosphere that stands between them, in which we exist. How can this be so? Because it is. Even the most unlikely things become 100% probable once they exist. But the blobs of molten rock spinning about the young sun, the coalescence of gases around a steaming sphere suspended in the blackness of space, the collision of a fairly large celestial body and the expulsion of a blob that became our moon, tethered to our gravity, the eventual condensation of oceans and the tidal effects of the moon, the eventual emergence of single celled organisms and, down the line, down the line, plants to oxygenate the air, animals to breathe the plant waste product, oxygen, and-- in time-- animals with senses, with vision (wondrous thing), with smell, with touch, with taste and hearing-- none of this seems particularly likely to me. But it happened. It is why we are. 

And we are in this moment, which we cannot fully understand. A moment of life. Life! Amazing.

And we are our conditioning. Our experience in this world has taught us to expect certain things, to see things according to norms, to perceive as we were taught to perceive. We have learned by positive example and by negative experience. We are a complex tangle of intersecting and sometimes conflicting conditioning. Conditioning of which we are not fully aware, but that colors our perception of this remarkable world in which we take part. Our conditioning also creates this moment. Our experience and perception of this moment, which we do not fully understand.

And we are members of a society and culture. We have our own subculture within that culture. We have many very human, constructed, decided-upon, customary things that make up our lives, our moments. We are not fully aware of how these things change who we are, what we experience. They help create this moment. Whether we know we are influenced or not, we are. We are marionettes in the web of our influences. All is influence. Culture and society move on inexorably, with our without us. They emerge from us, wherever humans gather together. They are us and greater than us. They are more than the sum of their parts. And yet, where the parts die they fade away. In the end, amassed power, wealth, technology and influence decide who we will be, how we will live, who will live, what our moments will be like. We are trapped in this moment, surrounded by our things and other people with their things and groupings of people in corporations and systems and their things and political bodies and their things and militaries and their things and so on and so forth and all these things influence and determine each other. They also make this moment, in which we exist, which we do not fully understand. 

Societies rise and fall, cultures flower and fade, humans continue doing all the things humans do. We can live our lives as well as we can and still, terrible things will be happening everywhere, to other humans-- beings just as amazing as we are. We can seek to correct society's wrongs, but stand a good chance of adding to them. Because we are human. What do humans do? They add and add and add and act and act and act and say and say and say and the rest of the world is changed. How do we change the world? We take it apart and build new things out of it, we kill it, destroy it, replant it, alter it genetically, collect and concentrate things at levels not found in nature, redesign it, add to it, subtract from it. We do not leave it alone. If we did leave it alone, the humans who do not leave it alone will supplant us. If we attack those who despoil the world that sustains us, we will either add to these human problems or we will be destroyed. We can live good lives and benefit others on a small scale, but all those that we benefit will be subjected to unchangeable things on a grand scale. Society has become as inexorable as weather patterns. We can predict it, but we cannot prevent it. We can prepare, we can stock up, we can batten down the hatches, we can protect or own, but the storm will come. We may be spared, we may not, but the most we can do is to do as little as possible. We must not add to the things that destabilize this grand and awesome moment in which we exist-- so improbable! We must not be a part of anger or greed or exploitation or outsized desires. We also must not think to change human nature or save the world. These things are out of our hands. We have this moment-- inconceivable and wondrous. Life.

We have imaginations and ambition. We can imagine a better world. We can even fight like Che Guevara for these glimmering in our minds. We may even succeed. But in time, humans doing human things will supplant even the most perfect of societies and we will be back to the same problems. Humans doing human things, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, in every corner of the planet.

But for the fact that we seize the grandeur and grace of this moment, we would do the same thing. But we appreciate that we are a small, small part of something unimaginably huge. Beyond comprehension. We are amazed at our own existence, the privilege of breath and thought. We will not squander our time with blind human pursuits. We will be in this moment, with all living things. We will live in a deep appreciation for all beings, all people, creatures and things with whom we share this existence. Because it is beyond comprehension that we even get to be here. This is amazing. We are alive! We can think! We can be aware of our selves! What else can compare?

We are emotion. We can chart the peaks and valleys of our existence based on those swings between love and loss, comfort and want, wonder and disappointment, dream and disillusionment, connection and isolation. Sometimes there are vast feelings of unity that come upon us when faced with a beautiful view, a quality of light when the sun is just setting and all is transformed, a work of art, a song a feeling of communion with a group of like-minded people, an exquisite taste or a sublime smell. We are sensory and chemical creatures. We can be transported or dulled by our experiences. Our nerve endings crave stimulation or relief and the shift between these two extremes can cause the most memorable of our moments.

But under all of that, we are still in this moment. We are something else, something more basic. The self, or internalized point of view, that is experiencing this moment. The world moves around us, but something stays the same. If we can be that self, that still point around which all things turn, then we can be truly *of* this moment. We can intuit, beyond the reach of thought and sensation, what we truly are, what a moment truly is, how it can be perceived as unperceivable, how it can be sensed as beyond sensation, how it can transcend probability and space and time and existence and even being and be that unnameable thing at the core of all that is. Empty and yet unfathomably full. Here and now and yet nowhere and never. All we ever really have and nothing. Us and no-one. Unity and multitudinous possibility. The answer and no answer at all. The abscence of a need for an answer. The center. The everything.

Where does it all come from? We don't know. 

It is amazing.

Just to be clear-- we know nothing.

 

Posted via email from Run Ahead of Me

The Creative Fire

My mind has always been strewn with tinder, set alight by imagination-- brilliant with flame. But art in its true practice is hardwood-- patiently carved into something fire-resistant, self-evident, semi-permanent, complete, but able to set the minds of others on fire with a single gaze.

My mind has been on fire, with art-- so much that I can hardly create. Instead I set ablaze the shavings from my intermittent attempts at carving and lean into the flames, in hopes they will burn away my need to be once again set afire.

The Trials of this Life

Everything in this society is an invitation to overwhelming emotions and violence.

It takes a lot not give in.

Here's a nugget of Zen wisdom: "When the mind is still, everything else can move around it and it can remain unaffected."

But how easy is that?

The neighbor's kid has gone out of his way to mow down the peas in my garden when he was trimming the weeds. He also took a dump in my compost pile, possibly making it toxic.

Last Father's Day he gave me what I like to think of as a "Happy Fucking Father's Day!" gift, by breaking fluorescent light bulbs all over my back porch.

It would be easy to be affected by these things, but he's obviously acting out of his own confusion. His behavior has nothing to do with me.

What would be the other option? Arguments? Violence? Getting even? All of that is short sighted and would just make my own life worse.

My brother recently decided to leave his family (wife and three kids). Once again, it would be easy to accept this invitation to have overwhelmingly negative feelings-- anger toward him and sorrow for his family and the rest of my family. I also could feel a lot of sorrow for him and confusion about what he's doing, and what possible motives he could have for doing such a thing.

But I have put a comfortable distance between myself and my family for precisely this reason. I would do no good by wading into a situation where I can only experience more sorrow.

I have to let him live his life. Even if he's harming others.

I have to let the neighbor kid live his life, even if he's making some seriously bad choices and targeting innocent people.

Sometimes this approach feels dangerously close to "not caring." But where does caring a lot get you? It gets you burned. It's better to live peaceably and avoid other peoples' drama.

There's always more than enough drama to go around. Why create anymore?

So, in the end, there's more than a little sorrow involved in just letting folks go about their business, making a mess of their lives and hurting those around them. But I will not be like them. I will remain still.

Posted via email from Run Ahead of Me

Dave Needs a Shave (a la Seuss)

Though it is hard to see, (because the picture is blurry), This is the portrait of a man who is inordinately furry. You can’t see much more than the tip of his nose, But that’s fine ‘cause in this photo he’s wearing no clothes. He grew up in the city in a family of lawyers, In houses and vacation homes with house maids and foyers. And he grew up believing in argumentation, And in conducting oneself in accord with one’s station. But as he grew older he began to resent, That he was allowed to say little about what he wore or where he went. So during a stint in a boarding school out in Ventura, He began to rethink all the things he’d been sure of. He was thinking a thought that was long and quite subtle, And then he began thinking his mother’s rebuttal. And then, realizing he’d been trained much too well, He snuck out at night and hopped a bus for Carmel. Out on the cliffs with all that was wild, He felt he’d been squelched since he was a child. Forced to be shorn and forced to be svelte-- None of this matched his true inner self. So discarding everything he’d been taught (and not learned) And all the things that he’d been given (but had not earned), He emptied his mind and took off his clothes, (As the indecent exposure charge on the arrest report shows). And that was the start of his extended flirtation With radical thinking and self-exploration. He ditched all his schooling and refused to go home, He tried to live in a hole in the woods like a gnome. He did without heat, clothes and food for a day, Then he decided he’d better find some other way. He felt he could deal with a job selling fruit, Because it was close to nature and his boss was hirsute. In his thinking, a job was not a capitulation, But a very small concession to civilization. In most things he wanted to be different from his folks But he did not want to fail and be the butt of their jokes. So he had to earn money, at least to get by, Until food and housing start to fall from the sky. The produce stand owner thought the kid was a freak But he showed up on time and worked hard all week. He made some new friends and got along with others And made his own clothes out of stuff found in dumpseters. One of his tenets was that it was a sin To cut off whatever grew out of one’s skin. He’d say, “Like the hair of the dog or the mane of a horse, It is best to let things take their natural course!” So, though his friends and co-workers found it all quite peculiar, He just got furry and then he got furrier. And being half Jewish with liberal political sympathies, He soon had hair out to his extremities. Soon he tripped on his beard and his hair concealed all emotion. The wind caught his afro and blew him out to the ocean. The Coast Guard found him entwined in the kelp, Fending off otters and yelling for help. Once safe on shore, shivering in the back of a squad car, He admitted, “Even the best thoughts can be taken too far.” What goes for the best, goes even more for the worst, But if you’ve been similarly dumb, rest assured, you ain’t the first. Now he’s a store manager, and wears a low fade, And has traded self-abnegation for a desire to get laid.

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Baby - Os Mutantes

There was one time when I was spending a lot of time out in the hinterlands of the Bay Area. I would get a map, find some semi-remote destination, get on a bus and head off into the woods to go hiking and camping. I spent most of my nights outdoors, my legs were generally tired, I bathed when I got back to civilization, and I liked it that way. It was like voluntary sporadic homelessness, except I had a base-camp in civilization to which I could return. In any case, one night when I was camped up in the hills of the Point Reyes National Seashore-- somewhere between Point Reyes Station and Bolinas-- I was listening to the radio as night fell and I happened upon the college station where they were playing the strangest line-up of Mexican metal bands and this Brazilian group called Os Mutantes. Turns out Os Mutantes was big in Brazil at around the time of the Beatles and was part of that whole explosion of brilliant rock during the 60s and 70s. Much of their oeuvre is insane, quirky, fun experimental stuff (reminiscent of the Beatles' more experimental work), but I fell immediately in love with this one track "Baby," which is a little ballad with a sparse instrumental track. I just love it. It doesn't really matter what it means exactly. There's just something refreshing and simple about it that stands the test of time. For me, at least. It also takes me back to that campsite in the woods, where I hiked for two days straight through beautiful coastal woodlands and along the rugged seashore. How do you beat that?

Pumpkin Master!

So two Saturdays ago, my son and I went to see a movie at the mall. We went a little early so that we could swing by the Farmer's Market. When we got off the bus, the first thing my son ran to was the "Guess the Weight of the Giant Pumpkin!" exhibit. What he wanted to do was draw all over the little pieces of paper that were out for people who wanted to guess the weight. He also wanted to write his name. So I was saying, "Good job! I like your train... oh, look, that's a letter 'i'," and stuff like that. So my son says, "You do one, Papa!" I look at the form, eyeball the pumpkin and say to myself, "What the heck. I know pumpkins. I've lifted plenty." I think for about five seconds, comparing a few weights in my mind and then write down 211 lbs., my address, and slip it in the box. I think no more of it. A couple of days ago I get this letter in the mail that says I won! Not only did I win, but I guessed the weight *exactly*! What are the chances of that? Just call me "Pumpkin Master." Send me your pictures and I'll guess your weight, too!