On Grace

Share

I cannot imagine a more perfectly beautiful day than today. As I walked to the local park, my calves tensed and flexed, my toes struggling to relearn how to grip in loose leather sandals, and the breeze sometimes raised ripples of goosebumps across my bare arms, only to drop suddenly and leave my shoulders and neck bare to hot cascading sunlight. I wasn't exactly comfortable, but I was walking and involved in the work of walking. And this was good.

As soon as I spread my checkered blanket in the shaded grass beneath the oak and settled myself down, the world slipped open into midmorning perfection. Or rather, I slipped into that beauty that had been waiting. My muscles warm and relaxed, the trees bristling with new green shot through with the lingering colors of the last blossoms of early spring, and the grass already thick and lush, studded with the yellow of dandelions. The sky, the definition of blue, gathered in around the source of sunlight, home to the white solitary animals of scattered clouds. It was the kind of day that children draw, scribbled shapes in primary colors. I sat in meditation for an hour, seeking the still center of my being, quieting down, working the energy out with ever breath, opening myself up to the wind and sunlight, to the land and the trees, to the dew, clouds and coming rain that circulated together with the waters of my body. And when I was finished, I stretched out, laying warm against the earth, feeling her wide body curving away in all directions as she turned, rising and falling beneath me with every heartbeat.


I have been thinking about grace recently. I have been thinking that what grace really is, is relationship. Relationship with one another, relationship with the harmonies that echo and glide through the Song of the World, relationship with the land, with earth, sea and sky, relationship with Spirit.

And I have been thinking that I don't understand you, not completely. I understand little parts of you, like being familiar with the edge of a wood or the shoreline of an ocean, and I can see a few paths leading in, sometimes I can imagine where they go, only guessing. In the end, I don't really know and I can't always follow. I have been thinking about the toast, "To know him, is to love him." And to love you, is to know you.


In Christianity, grace is a gift from God. One might even say it is the gift from God. The Christian concept of grace is often misunderstood, misrepresented or misapplied, even by Christians. Sometimes, it is something withheld to all but the chosen few, the benediction of favoritism--and if you don't feel moved to agree, then clearly you haven't been chosen. But in the Catholicism of my childhood, "Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of [communal spiritual] life." (CCC 1997) It is relationship, and the capacity for such relationship, that the Divine gives freely and undeserved, to everyone. Spirit pours itself forth, continuously. Rain falls on both the evil and the good. Try to build a ladder to heaven and you will never make it; only, stand on the highest step and ask, and Spirit will lean close to kiss you deeply. This is grace. Those who have it, have not earned it or built it or won it as reward. They are simply the ones who thought to ask, and to allow Spirit to answer.

This is grace. Those who have it, touch the meaning of movement and stillness, of cultivation and surrender. The world is utterly full of grace, in every pocket of ecology and art. Each season has its grace, each body, ugly, old or tired as it may be. All things are in relationship, all things harbor connection at their core. When Druidry speaks of harmony and balance, the Song of the World, the web of being, this is grace. The emergent fitting-together of life's messiness and tension. The dance and weave, the tides and whirlwinds. The last magnolia blossoms unfurled and weeping in the dark magnificent howling storm. The first bee of spring, the perfect slivery sphere of a dandelion wish, the sunlight and the burn. The ant stumbling across the blanket's immense landscape of fuzzies and folds. Grace is relationship, and Druidry is brimming with it.


So when you explain yourself, your ideas and priorities, I have my own reactions, the places where the edges of your thoughts rub up against mine. But when I sit and think on it a little more, I also sense that place deep within you, the depths of the woods or water, what isn't readily accessible. I come from a similar place within myself, which is probably why we sometimes fight, frustrated at each other for not understanding, accusing each other of not really listening.


I can hardly comprehend my whole self sometimes. Thoughts and ideas rise to the surface every once in a while, looming up out of the depths, and they're familiar, I recognize them as naturally my own. But I cannot hold onto them, or at least, I can't hold onto all of them at once. (Ani says, "You wouldn't try to put the ocean in a paper cup.") Sometimes, I have to work, I have to move even within myself, to remember, to get back to them again. The way I can't hold the whole of a Celtic knotwork pattern in my mind at once, but if I trust in process, following step by step--this notch up, this notch down, this thread over, this thread under--the thing comes into being anyway, whether I can see it coming or not. Water slipping down a mountain side, gravity doing its work, grace and love finding their own way out.

I do not want to be completely understood. I am deep and wide, hungry and restless for the world. I am not one thing or the other, I am the little animal slipping through the grasses, and the grasses, and the missing space between. But I still want to be loved, even if only in small parts, because I think really, that's enough, that's all it takes. We just have to start out loving small parts of people--the little things strangers say in public places, the look of this person or that person walking down the street and how no one else looks or walks quite that way, just little things--and the rest comes of its own accord, following the natural pathways of connection laid down.


What I mean is, I can't comprehend you completely, as I can't comprehend myself. We're just too big for that, you and I. But comprehension is different from caring, from love. Maybe we can love just one small part of something, and love is like the water or the knotwork, following its own path until the all of things connects. We can love just one tiny part of something or someone, just one small part of the world--the color of this one leaf, the shape of that one cloud, the sound of this one bird--and when we love it deeply, when we enter in to that outreaching fluidity of love, suddenly we find ourselves, slipping, connecting to everything else. Gracefully, we draw ourselves into relation, into relationship.

I love you, not completely, but already and in little bits and pieces. That's a start.

On Striving & Strife

Share

The following is an excerpt from my personal journal. It's self-indulgent and whiny, to give you fair warning. But I had a tough day at work and I'm exhausted and I need to hear from you lovely, supportive people out there that it's not all noise and worthless effort.... Because I have absolute faith you'll chime in to comfort me. Because you're wonderful like that.

I really do like my work. What I dislike, at times, is my job.

Which might sound weird, since most people who wait tables dislike the customers. I actually quite like my customers. Rarely these days do I meet someone who is just so awful and demanding and rude that it actually upsets me. Most of the time, a sincere smile and honest effort to be helpful will decrease the stress-level of even the angriest customer, and those few that can't be appeased or helped, well, they're only going to be there for an hour or so anyway at most, and then they're gone.

What's stressful is coworkers. Especially lazy coworkers who do nothing but complain about the work and the customers, and then turn around and complain that they don't get more hours or that their customers don't tip them better. Well, which is it? Either you want to be here more (and really earn the money you somehow think customers owe you), or you want to be here less and forfeit good tips because of a lazy, bad attitude.

What stresses me out is that, I love my work. I mean my real work, the work of writing and studying and engaging deeply with the world through an active spiritual and artistic life. And I do it for free, a measly three days a week and whatever other hours I can scrape together. The other four days, I go in (very early and always on time) to a job where, on any given day I could work my ass off for almost nothing, but where most of the time I wait on customers who like me and tip me reasonably well. I don't smoke (cigarettes or pot), I don't drink, I don't party, I don't drive, I don't have cable or even health insurance. I make tons of sacrifices so that I can squeak by working four days a week at a "real job" so that on my days off I can--what? relax? get high? go to the bar? No. So that I can write essays and poetry, meet self-set deadlines for book reviews and newsletters that don't earn me a dime, go to the park to be grateful for the trees, spend time in meditation and practicing guitar. I love my work.

Meanwhile, I am open to ridicule because I "never go anywhere" and I never "do anything" but "sit around and read books." Some days, even when my customers are kind, my coworkers make me feel like crying. I have the right to the choices I've made with my life, and I have worked hard at this restaurant for four years now, to earn seniority, to establish a regular schedule and familiar customers. So that in my spare time, instead of frittering away funds on things to help me escape reality, I can settle down into my life and learn to love it, learn to cultivate happiness and gratitude, and try my hardest to give back, to give freely and without need for compensation or reward. Because I want to be that kind of person, the person who can give freely, with no strings attached, because her basic needs are met and she's content.

It's been a long time since anyone loved me for my good intentions. You spend enough years at a job like this, and you start to think that the only thing that matters is what you actually accomplish, what you can actually do for others. They don't care if you're trying. And everyone wants something. The list grows, and the more efficient you are, the more they want. And gods forbid you're happy--because, certainly, they aren't, and they will want what they think you have, since it seems to bring you something they haven't found for themselves. So they will criticize your restraint and your modest lifestyle, and they will continually fight for those shifts you rely on to barely scrape by. How can you please them, how can you possibly ever give them what they want from you? They want you to be like them--to go clubbing, buy expensive clothes, blow hundreds of dollars on pot and cigarettes--and at the same time, they want you to make do with even less, to cut back so that they can have more. It's only fair.

But I'm tired. I work so hard, because I love my work. Still, every once in a while, I want to be loved just for trying. I want to be supported and appreciated because I strive, because every day, every moment of my life, I am always striving. Striving to be a better waitress, striving to be a better coworker, a better writer and a better thinker and a better friend. To be more independent, and to be more involved; to be more caring, and to be thicker-skinned; to be more confident, and to be more modest; to be more ethical, and to be more accepting; to be more outgoing, and to be more easy-going; to be more imaginative, and to be more realistic. I even try, idiotically, to be more helpful and efficient while maintaining a socially acceptable level of apathy and cynicism.

And yesterday, my best friend confides that he sometimes feels he can't talk to anyone because no one cares about the things he does, or at least not as much. So I want to care even more, to read and learn even more, so that I can be there for him and be someone he can talk to. Because he's important to me and I don't want him to feel alone. But I only have so much energy. And sometimes, I don't know what to do. I try to seek stability and health, so that I can be my best, so that I can accomplish all these things... but sometimes, I end up feeling utterly inadequate.

Last night, I dreamt that my best friend and I were at a parade, and he handed me a small brown pill. I swallowed it whole, like an inside joke, and it turned me into a donkey. And I just ran away from everything, ran on my four hooves striking the dirt, my tail swinging at flies and my long ears flopping, soft and gray. To be a beast of burden, to be soft and gray and free to be simple, to chew grass and stare with large eyes at the world.

So this is the parade. And I'm the ass.

Thoroughly Thurled

Share

In the dream, my old college professor feeds page after page of the Torah into the scanner, letters scrolling down a nearby computer screen in a kind of river-like matrix, flickering, converting to numbers and back again.

The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels; this is what my boyfriend and I discussed over lunch the day before, sitting in the cafe of the local natural history museum, munching on organic veggie wraps and grilled cheese sandwiches. The linguistics of thought, the shape of consciousness, mind itself, embedded with grammar, running over syntax like water over stone, plunging, eddying and moving on again. Breath, exhalation, that which is sacred and cannot be written. The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels. We asked each other, does that make a difference?

In the dream, the computer script searches for meaningful combinations of letters reconverted according to some obscure theological algorithm, a pulsating crossword-puzzle alive with juxtaposition. Now and then, a word in red slips by amidst the stream of symbols and nonsense text. "A red-letter day," my old professor jokes. Mundane words, articles and adjectives, verbs, nothing that coheres or speaks. One catches my eye, and I peck at the keyboard to check the software for bugs.

"There's something wrong," I answer my professor's raised eyebrow, "It's generating noise, now. 'Thurl,' for instance, isn't a real word."

"Yes it is!" He laughs shortly. In dreams, he's often laughing.

"I've never heard of it. Then what does it mean?"

"It is the time," he says, "in a TV Western pistol duel, between when somebody shouts 'Draw!' and somebody else shoots. Or, it is the time right after afternoon tea, but right before an early dinner." I can tell he's teasing me. I wake up scoffing and grinning.

Down at the park that day, I'm too enthralled by the moving surface of the stream to notice the hem of my dress darkening with muddy water where it drags along the rock's edge. I crouch, bare feet planted on the warm rough stone where it juts out into the middle of the creak, and watch the tangled green locks of algae wriggle in the current beneath webbed reflected sunlight.

"I looked it up," I tell my boyfriend, "and it turns out, it means, 'the hip joint of cattle.'"

"So you got that one wrong!" He dips a big toe into the water, saying, "It's not as cold as I expected--but slippery."

"Well, I don't know. So, the other definitions were, 'an aperture or hole'--or as a verb, 'to cut through, to pierce.' And then there's something to do with mining, 'a communication between two adits.' An adit is the long, horizontal entrance or passage into the mine."

"I still don't see what that has to do with dueling." He straddles rocks, gripping his way from one to another towards where I'm perched over the raw umber rushing water. The stream presses itself through a few cracks in the stone, becoming a small waterfall that churns iridescent and pushes an exhalation of soft-gray bubbles down to brush the bottom of the streambed before rising swiftly back to the surface. From where I sit, I can watch this happening forever, never growing old.

"There's a story--I think it's a Zen parable--about a butcher whose knives never get dull. Everyone thinks he must have some magic about his knives, or a special kind of metal, so that he never needs to sharpen them. One day, his young apprentice gets up the nerve to ask. And he explains, his knives never get dull because he doesn't actually cut through the meat and bone the way a less skillful butcher would. Instead, he finds the thin-spaces-between that already exist in the flesh, and he just slips his knife into them."

"That sounds like it's probably Zen," my boyfriend agrees. I stand to embrace him as he steps cautiously onto the rock where I've been crouching. It's then, straightening up, that I notice for the first time my skirt's hem, damp and heavy dragging along the rock, leaving a dirty streak where it slaps and clings to my pale lower calf. "Don't you feel as though winter is still hanging around?" he asks, looking out over the surrounding swamp. The noisy creak twines through last year's leftover straw-like cattails. The sky above is an aching hue of blue unbroken by clouds. A few overhanging trees have just begun to bud. He holds me close, and I can feel his diaphragm expand and contract, his whole body warm against me as he sighs.

"Maybe a little, but I can't really feel it when you're smothering me like this," I say to provoke him. He pulls away in playful defiance, teases and prods me until I recant.



"I think it was a story about the time between when you breathe in, and when you breathe out," I say, sometime later. "But the 'hip joint of cattle' reminded me of it, and then there are all those obsolete definitions about piercing and apertures, openings, entrance-ways, communications. And--if you think about it, that moment of a duel between the draw and the shot, that thin-space-between when nobody breathes. Or the time between meals, I think that was supposed to be a joke about just how wide that space-between can feel sometimes, when someone is hungering. And then, if Hebrew has no vowels, 'thurl' is just how you'd say 'thrill' without the 'i', thrll. Isn't thrill also a kind of moving through the thin-space-between?"

He looks at me with a mix of incredulity and amazement. "How is it that you can learn vocabulary in your sleep?"

"I'm just that good." I wrinkle my nose at him, which is my way of winking or raising an eyebrow.

"And this morning you were saying you were 'too full of words.'"

"I was--too full of words, my brain was noisy. I couldn't focus. But being out here..."

We're walking home, through the wooded ravine that will lead out of the park back into the cluttered urban neighborhood. The soles of my feet are still recalling the warm solidity of rock beneath them, my toes the quick sliding skin of water. We're still stuck smack in the city, the white-noise grind of traffic reaching us through the trees, but everywhere the birds are following each other, the scrappy chipmunks skittering over roots and the ruts left by bicycle tires in the mud. There are insects again, bees in the underbrush, and I feel as though I have escaped, finally, from some cold pressure that has wrapped my lungs for so long I had ceased to notice it. There is space again, movement in all directions that pull and stretch the landscape into distance, opening it up again. Everywhere, life is opening it up again under a high, bright sky. Birdcalls pierce the breeze, connecting one long, dark tunnel of mind to another.

"Being out here... I'm so full of thurl."

Ode to Finitude

Share

What follows is a poem I wrote just after completing the first draft of my previous post, which I hadn't been at all satisfied with. The title of the piece is rather self-explanatory. I hope you enjoy, and that you've been taking full and joyful advantage of April as National Poetry Month!

Ode to Finitude

Limit, you goddess, daughter of
        Form, overcome me, overtake me
        again with sweet extremity!
Rope me to the glory of your
        monstrous bones, rigging
        for the dancing world--
I will dance, my feet hard and rolling
        because I have feet; I will
        slap my hands to your gusty
rhythm, because I have hands; I will sing
        from a quivering throat, vibration
        mother of voice, because
I have voice--I will praise you, my
        maligned divinity, my shapely
        sublime, Limit, I will run
my tongue along your edges,
        I will kiss your every limb,
        for I have tongue, lips and limbs,
my own sweet utter skin, I have
        a wide pale body with which to
        billow before Spirit, grandmother
Mind, old Ever-Present, too ancient for
        dust. I have known her, too,
        dreaming, she is soft and fat with the dark
openness of space--but you! Limit,
        my lovely, my little boat,
        we will skip, we will go sailing
quick and bright
        over the long silent waters of the Real.

Dream the World Awake

Share

The idea that "life is but a dream" seems to be cropping up a lot in my life recently, and when this kind of synchronicity happens I usually try to pay attention, think carefully and keep my ears pealed. Often a growing obsession will draw me on with a certain fascination or magnetism, increasing in intensity until I reach a moment of triumph or break-through, when the struggle to comprehend resolves into an unexpected and unexpectedly easy clarity. But this time is different. Whenever someone mentions this idea that life is a dream, that we are the dreamers dreaming the world, that our goal or purpose is (or should be) to "dream the world awake"--I feel repelled, repulsed even. Far from wanting to pursue the idea, I am constantly backing away, insisting no, no it isn't; and yet, the theme keeps appearing suddenly, slipping around some corner like a stubborn ghost. So for now, I'd like to take a moment to articulate for myself--and for you, dear reader, if you care to tune in--where this sense of repulsion and objection comes from, why I feel so invested in the "realness" of this life and world. Perhaps by doing this, the reasons for this unwelcome haunting may become clearer.

Dreaming the Persistent Other

Don't get me wrong. I am not your typical secular Westerner who eagerly dismisses dreams as the randomly generated nonsense and noise of a tired brain in rehash-and-recovery mode. There is of course that problem, when comparing our existence to a dream in a culture that refuses to take dreams seriously, much like the metaphor of the amusement park ride that Bill Hicks uses in the video clip above. Such a comparison can, intentionally or merely by implication, express a certain nihilism. "It doesn't matter--it's just a ride," Bill Hicks assures us immediately after mentioning our tendency to kill off good people, those with the wisest souls and kindest intentions.

But it does matter! Doesn't it? In a dream we might experience a tragic and horrifying murder, one that has us shaking and sobbing and slobbering into our shirt sleeves, only to wake up the next morning to a real world washed with dew and full of life. It doesn't matter, it was just a dream, we breathe with relief, and smile. It wasn't real. But we can say this precisely because those dream-people, whether they die in dream or not, cease to be when the dream has ended. They have no unique or independent existence from the dream, and so in a very important sense they simply aren't real. But even the most level-headed, down-to-earth Miss Practical-Shoes might pause to phone up her brother if she dreams that he has died or fallen gravely ill; perhaps not because she believes her dream to be true or accurately reflective of reality, but maybe simply because she recognizes her brother as a unique being with an independent existence and her dream reminds her of her interest in and concern for his well-being. On the other hand, when dream-people reappear or persist from night to night, they can grow to have a semblance of independent existence. Ask any child suffering from night terrors, any grown adult struggling with recurring nightmares: the anxiety of repeated dreams can be very real, indeed, with powerful effects on life in the waking world.

The importance of the dream-world in our "real" lives increases tenfold when you believe, as I do, that dreams are a way for us to connect with aspects of ourselves and our world that we can't normally access in "ordinary consciousness" while awake. In dreams, intuitions and extrasensory perceptions take on concrete symbolic forms that we can interact with and even, potentially, influence. We may travel to places we've never been, only to arrive there the following day with a sense of familiarity. We may anticipate the needs of others, their vulnerabilities or fears, before we have consciously acknowledged them. We may even encounter nonmaterial creatures, beings of energy, emotion and thought, guides and gods, ancestors and children not yet born. In amongst the chatter and noise of our sleeping brain's reverberating chemistry, we might discover revelation and prophecy, if we are listening attentively, respectfully and with a hint of healthy incredulity. In short, it's rarely true that a dream is "just a dream," even when it is. Rather, dreams have the potential to connect us to a vast interwoven, multilayered reality that penetrates and transcends our ordinary experience as individuated material selves.

So what do people mean, exactly, when they say "life is just a dream"? Do they mean that somehow suffering and pain as we experience it in this life is illusory, unimportant, irrelevant? Even if such a view can free a person, to some extent, from his own suffering (especially if it is self-generated through fear or guilt), it is unlikely to help him cultivate compassion for the suffering of others. After all, their pain isn't real. When we wake up, we'll discover we are God, and then won't we all have a good laugh. Besides which, not only is the pain of others not real, but perhaps even the other itself is not real. Perhaps, like the people populating my dreams, I'm making you all up and one day I'll wake up to discover that I am God dreaming the World dreaming Me (and I've been talking to myself in my sleep). In which case, all the more reason to shrug off strife, pain and death when it happens to other people and focus primarily on my own happiness and self-fullfilment. I might as well make it as enjoyable a dream as possible, right? And thusly whither away concepts like self-restraint, sacrifice, altruism and even love beyond that of self-gratification.

Dreaming the Creative Act

Granted, most people who talk about the world-as-dream have, I think, a more sophisticated concept in mind. If I understand it correctly, the metaphor is meant to illuminate our role as "dreamers," that is, creators of our own realities. We have all experienced in dream the strange freedom from ordinary causality: a painting we see in our dream reminds us of our old childhood family farm, and suddenly we find ourselves again at the farm itself, just as we remember it. Or, we want to get to the theater faster, and suddenly we are not running but flying, gliding, leaping buildings. People morph into other people and back again. We play out a scene as we simultaneously watch ourselves playing it out from some external perspective. These are all common-place in the dream-world. The usual laws of gravity and time do not apply. And because of this freedom from physics and normal cause-and-effect, our wills are raw with power, the dream-world seems to respond readily to our stray thoughts and passing whims. Not only are we, as the dreamer asleep, creating the entire dream-world as we experience it, but even within the dream we sometimes have a sense of heightened control. Even nightmares--of being unable to run or scream, of being displaced out of context or willfully misunderstood by everyone around us--can evoke a sense of irrational lawlessness that, if only we could master it with a stronger will!, we feel sure would sway just as eagerly in our favor.

Because this is true of dreams, people who compare the "real world" and our existence in it to dreaming often strive to emphasize our ability to shape our reality, to influence it through intention and focused willpower to an extent far greater than we usually believe possible. As a philosopher-poet type myself, who has fostered a life-long love for art and creative work of all kinds, I came to my belief in the fundamentally imaginative-creative aspect of our existence many years ago. And yet, there are aspects of the world-as-dream metaphor that nag at me, striking me as sloppy or inaccurate. Besides the problems of suffering and the collective or Other that I mentioned above, if we take the world-as-dream analogy too seriously we soon run up against a major stumbling block: science.

I have written before about the relationship between science and magic, in response to the ponderings of other skeptics. The world-as-dream approach may seem to circumvent much of the conflict by suggesting that the physical "laws" of hard science, being just another aspect of our dreaming the world--are thus only as inflexible as we believe them to be. Suddenly, we are free to believe whole-heartedly and without complication in things like synchronicity, intention manifestation and mysterious action-at-a-distance. The problem with this view is that we also succeed effectively in turning science into a collective delusion, in which we all agree that free-falling objects accelerate at exactly 9.8 meters per second per second and the earth revolves around the sun rather than the reverse (though this has only been true since most of us started believing it).

Although I am far from a materialist, I do have this odd knack for befriending atheists and science geeks. Because of these friendships, over the years I have developed a tremendous respect for the scientific process of discovery and analysis, as well as an acute appreciation of its natural epistemological limits. In other words, although it may be true that science can only describe this one tiny little aspect (that of the material, physical world) of a greater transcendent reality, it proves to describe that particular aspect with surprising clarity and consistency. Much more lucidly and reliably, I would argue, than one might expect of a human species still unable to agree about things like whether yellow American cheese is yellow or actually orange. (Certainly, we can come up with all sorts of elaborate theories about a guiding superconsciousness or Spirit that sets limits on how our own chaotic willfulness ultimately manifests, but most of these prove cyclical and self-justifying, with no way of gauging their validity, likelihood or relevance.) Furthermore, because science has set for itself the goal of dealing uniquely and specifically with the physical world, and we have all experienced either directly through experimentation or indirectly through the by-products of science such as technology and medicine, to call science into question as mere delusion calls into question these experiences themselves and our ability to trust our most fundamental intuitions about the world in which we live and move and have our being.

For some, this notion is not disturbing at all. Of course we should mistrust our senses and experiences of the world; Descartes, Father of the Scientific Method, said so himself! (Although he may have only said it as a sneaky way of getting the Church off his back.) But as an artist, the thought of being so fundamentally disconnected from the physical world around me as I experience it not only frightens me, but shakes my notion of meaningful engagement to its very core. I engage with the world creatively, through writing, music and art. But as Annie Dillard points out, "an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials," even while the philosopher roams the realm of ideal forms and the mystic soars deep to the seat of fiery love and union. The shape and limit of matter, its particularities and idiosyncrasies, its movement and resistance, all of these aspects of the physical world are absolutely and utterly essential for the creative artist. One is not creative in spite of but because of them. I know and trust the power of words--and my own creative power in working with them--because I have come to respect them as having a kind of existence and life of their own, a reality that reaches beyond my own will and so can also grab hold of me and yank me suddenly beyond myself. I am not a master or maker of words, I am a friend, a companion, a lover. In the same way as a musician finds a companion in his instrument or a sculptor in her stone or clay. These things must be real at least in some sense, and we must be able to trust our experiences of them, if our creative work is to make any connection, to have any meaning.


And so, it seems to me that, even if these world-dreamers are right, even if life in this world really is "just a dream," this is one of those times when, as they say, "the only way out is through." Rather than dismiss our experiences of a stable, scientifically-comprehensible physical world as merely the self-perpetuated shared delusion of a people asleep, we must seek to engage this world deeply and passionately, cultivating attention and presence in all aspects of our lives with the playfulness, creativity and trust of children. By doing so we discover that, like our dreams themselves when we stop reducing them or explaining them away, the world will reveal to us an infinite potential for deeper connection, understanding, evolution and awakening.

& Sleepless Spring

Share

I am in one of those odd moods tonight, a mood that has grown into an odd compulsion, really--the compulsion not to go to sleep. Perhaps it's only because I spent most of the day (after an important meeting this morning), lounging around the apartment reading and watching the snow fall.

Yes, you read correctly: here in Pittsburgh, it's been snowing all day.

This morning was suffused with a kind of strange quiet joy. As I walked to my appointment, there seemed to be so much light, all things seemed touched with and emanating brightness, and stillness. And yet, the clouds overheard were thick and gray, rolling in layers, and I could not find that place in the sky where the sun's presence carves out a hard blindness into which you can't ever look. I could look anywhere, everywhere, and yet...

O, I'm not articulating myself very well. It's late. But the blossoms on the trees, flush and swollen with recent rains, each petal soft and opened as if lapping at the snow, and the snow like heavy pieces of light broken off from the gray, billowing skyline and scattered, drifting, settling in the nooks and curves of every limb, still mostly bare and so dark and thin. The pear tears, tiny bursting bouquets of white flowers, and the magnolias--goddess of the magnolia!, she bewilders and overwhelms me every April--and the tight little fists of the dogwood blossoms and pursed lips of the crabapple trees, not yet open, pinched shut against the cold and snow. The trees seemed to exude the crystalline white dusting like sap running warm up from warm earth, touching every tip and seeping as though from a thousand eager wounds, while the frigid petals of winter's last precipitation bloomed midair, everywhere, amongst a brightness that brought tears shivering on the edges of my eyes, running one, then another, loose along my cheek, protesting against the wind.

There are too many exuberant words in this description--it was simple, and quiet, god so very quiet. It was not a lapse back into deadening, claustrophobic winter--it was the opposite! As if everything that was not Spring had ceased or shut itself away beneath the brightness shimmering, every blooming thing etched and framed with the perfect emptiness and void of snow, as if to say: this, this here is the season, these green and growing bits, here, the yellows, lavenders and rose, the pussy willow buds holding their breaths until they explode with tufts of pollen... I'm not saying it right. You had to have been there, to be walking in it.

It's not that I feel as though I can't go to sleep--it's more like I have the strong impression that I shouldn't. That I should stay awake, that I should... remain awake. Perhaps forever. Perhaps only for tonight.

I might be in love.

As I was walking, through the piercing brightness of day, I thought about gods, and why we believe in gods who cannot save us, who cannot stoop to tilt the earth back into healthy cycles of warming and revolving, or intervene in war and famine, or perform even the most ordinary of miracles. I thought about gods, and why we bother. But there are mornings--and the nights that follow them--when you can't ask those kinds of questions. They don't make sense. The words are in the right order, the sounds move and you recognize the inflection and the tone--but it is all only so much noise and rhythm in the still. These are the gods that come and go, this is the world as it has always been, holy, infused, en-chanted, wide open like a wound or a dead thing or a cupped palm filling with water and then draining again. Why--the pale curl of the fingers, the white blood cells gathering, the white worms working their way to the surface of the flesh--we work and work at the why, but there's no way of taming a god.

At night, either you believe, or you go to sleep alone. I have slept that way for years, alone with my body, with my whys and cupped hands and busying blood. What will I say next? How will I get from there to here, to where I am tonight? Two months ago, it occurred to me to change, to shift, and I found that I could do it. This is all nonsense. It's late, and I'm not really saying anything. There was a moment I thought I made a movement, a course correction, but now I think that was just a trick of the light. Still, before where there was only myself, not even that, less than even that, now there are hands, dark and solid and warm and not my own, there are magnolia blossoms, deer moving in the hollow, an undoing, a belief in something, a compulsion or longing or wakefulness, and breath, and sleepless spring.

Conspire, Perspire, Expire

Share

The Actual Conversation

The muzak system is playing Smash Mouth: Somebody once asked could I spare some change for gas, I need to get myself away from this place... Sitting in the last corner booth after work today, next to the day-shift manager as he trains the newly promoted cover, Steve, in number-crunching paperwork. "Two to thaw, three to bake. Have them bag up four dozen, we go through a lot on weekend midnights." I twirl my fork, push spaghetti around my plate. I said, Yep, what a concept, I could use a little fuel myself, and we could all use a little change...

Across from me Steve bends over the pages and pages of prep lists and stock inventory, scribbling in numbers with the stub of a pencil. He's dressing up these days, classier than the polo shirt and eye-bleedingly red apron he used to wear like the rest of us servers; now, he's in black slacks and a button-up collared shirt and tie, also black. It's like he's trying to turn the restaurant into the Matrix. Would you like the red pill or the blue pill? Can I bring you fries with that? Steve's girlfriend is Pagan. They're both amazingly industiral-goth when not in uniform. Now he's crunching numbers as middle management in the food service industry. This is how life is sometimes.

The day-shift manager asks me to slide out for a second so he can go make a phone call in the office, and in a moment Steve and I are joined by another friend, Frank, who's snacking on some fries before his dinner shift begins. Frank is tall, with no waist, a neatly trimmed goatee and big clunky shoes; he always brings his uniform to work in a backpack stitched all over with anarchy symbols. Once when there was a bomb threat at the post office next door, he turned the bag inside out just in case the investigating police might get the wrong idea. When Frank is being funny, he purses his lips and blinks his eyes.

"Rob said he loves me like a rock," I tell Frank, to make conversation. "So I asked him if he meant that he really loves rocks, or that rocks have very strong emotions." Frank raises his eyebrows at me. "You know--if he loves me as though I were a rock, or if he loves me as though he were a rock... He told me to shut up."

"Maybe he meant the-way-in-which-he-loves-you is like a rock, you know, solid and durable... and slowly being worn down by the constant erosion of wind and water." Frank and I both giggle. Steve continues crunching numbers, chewing on his lip and ignoring us.

"See, I was just about to say, 'Yes, but that's not as funny,' but you proved me wrong." I twirl more spaghetti onto my fork. (This is the way my conversations at work go, hopping from one clever or ridiculous non sequitur to another, seeing what acrobatics of wit or syntactic contortions we can accomplish. So after a pause, I add:) "Stupid global warming."

Steve, in his all-black-cover-manager-threads-and-silk-tie, mutters without looking up at either of us, "Global warming isn't real."

For a moment, Frank and I don't say anything. I mumbled with my mouth full of pasta. "What?" Frank asks.

"I said, 'Well that's enlightened of you...'" Then, holding my hand up on the wrong side of my mouth, I say to Frank in a faux-whisper that Steve can hear perfectly well, "But I was being sarcastic."

"Global warming isn't real," Steve says again, this time stopping his scribbling and tapping the pencil stub on the table a few times. "It's just something the government made up to make money."

It's hard to read Frank's expression, his lips working into a purse but his eyes wide open. Still, I can't help but chime in (at risk of being the only person at the table with, you know, a functioning brain), "I don't know... making money by asking us to consume less; sounds kind of counterintuitive."

"I think," Frank says, blinking, "instead of addressing any real problems, they should just invest everything in some ridiculously pointless master plan. You know, like a Planet Umbrella," he adds, saving us all from having to muddle through a serious conversation.

I laugh. Steve goes back to his paperwork. Frank finishes his fries as the conversation moves on to other things.


What I Should Have Said

Now wait. Let's pretend I'm a slightly different person than I am, someone with more practice (or less civility) in confronting people about the fundamentally ignorant or frightfully misinformed statements they sometimes make in the course of casual conversation.

"Global warming isn't real," Steve says again, "It's just something the government made up to make money."

"Let me get this straight," this Other Ali would say. "You're telling me that our government, the government of the United States of America, invented an elaborate lie about global warming as early as the 1970s, then conspired to spread this lie all across the world, convincing scientists from every industrialized nation to 'independently verify' such a concept through hundreds of studies, all conducted independently. Then, when the rest of the world has completely fallen for this thoroughly convincing lie and everyone begins signing silly Kyoto Protocols and such nonsense, you know, cutting emissions, designing more energy-efficient vehicles, the U.S. government--the same government that supposedly conspired to tell this Lie of Global Warming in the first place--refuses to play along and instead decides to reject the whole idea, to reduce regulations and to encourage hugely wasteful and backwards industry models that only serve to put our manufacturing and technology industries far behind foreign competition. Despite this, our government persists, cleverly, in being very vocal in the fake denial of the lie they conspired to create and disseminate, and this goes on for decades and decades (meanwhile, the country's weathermen and meteorologists are in on it, too, reporting on the ever-increasing number of 'record-breaking heat waves' and extreme weather conditions all over the world). All of this, so that now, when even fellow American citizens have finally come to believe the lie the government has been telling them by way of everyone-except-the-government, they can make a little money off the fad of shopping for organic tomatoes and driving foreign-built hybrid cars. This is the story you want me to believe?

"I'm all one for conspiracy theories," this Other Ali would continue, "but I'm more inclined to wonder why the only 'scientific' studies that call global warming into question have been pursued and sponsored by corporate and government think-tanks. Or why it is only the American media that assume 'fair and balanced' means including misleading claims of the hypocritically-capitalist, irrationally anthropocentric Religious Right to balance out the bias of actual fact confirmed by countless peer-reviewed and respected scientific studies. Or why the CEOs of American car companies continue to spout global-warming-denial rhetoric and portray fuel-efficiency as merely a trendy innovation; the same rhetoric proffered by oil companies who make billions of dollars in profit when gas prices rise in response to national security threats and personal economic anxieties that the government helps to create and maintain with its fear-mongering and willful incompetence. Conspiracy? Sure thing. You're right there, Steve.

"Certainly, now that global warming has become so firmly established among the educated population of the world, now that its effects are becoming apparent even to the amateur observer with any long-term memory of what childhood winters used to be like--in short, now that the government and corporations of this country can no longer get away with complete and unadulterated denial... of course they're now trying to make money off of global warming, trying to reduce it to a trend, a brand, a marketing strategy. They're racing panicked around the deck of a sinking ship, dismantling it board by board and trying to sell the parts to us as life-preservers. Certainly they wouldn't want us to take anything too seriously, to question their priorities or actually maybe change the fundamental way we live our lives. Gods forbid we learn how to swim.

"And isn't your girlfriend Pagan? Isn't her best friend Pagan, too, and you're all housemates together? Even if you're right about everything, even if global warming is a Big Lie the government has told us, even if that's true--how do you reconcile consumption and waste with a love of the earth and the sacred celebration of its seasons? How can you ignore the very basics of ecology, the cycle of resources, the vast interconnected web of being? How do you turn yourself off to the singing of the trees choked by smog, the streams humming as they empty into oceans clogged with pollution and whole continents of plastic refuse set adrift by our recklessness? What lie could the government tell that could be worse than this, worse than the lie that we have the right to live as callously and selfishly as we like, to consume and squander and whine for more, ceaselessly and without consequence? And what is Paganism to you, if it has no room for the earth in it? Just a mishmash of misguided antiauthoritarianism and fashion accessories, the fringe-thrill of worshipping gods that make the WASPs and JWs squeam? And have you ever stopped and wondered, then, who exactly is making money off of your religion?

"Not to get on your case, Steve. We're all friends here."