Glass in a Time of Fear

Here we are again. I’m listening for the future to send out a beacon. I’ve been polishing the mirrors on the telescope of my consciousness for any transmissions from beyond the chatter of mundane humanity. I just read an article about how glass has changed the world and may contribute to greater change still- largely due to its unique molecular amorphous constitution. It is somehow both liquid and solid, or somewhere between the two, and can therefore take on novel ingredients that can change its qualities and expand its uses. There is glass that bounces and may help repair cartilage in people with arthritis. Bioglass. The nearly ubiquitous element, silicon - of which glass is made- is one of the most abundant elements on earth-along with oxygen. Cell phones. Fiber optic cables. Reading glasses. Windows. Solar panels. Through this element, the whisper of light asks us questions about our intent, allows us the ability to relate, to communicate, to see, to generate - it insists we purify our will, our capacity for love, for the love that does, that helps. It takes the purest of glass to make the lenses that allow us to peer into the deepest regions of space, that may allow us to see planets circling distant stars. There is the lore of the human body as a crystal - as we purify ourselves, the light of the divine is able to shine through us. In the movie Kundun, the Dalai Lama says he is like a mirror. When asked if he is the Lord Buddha, he replies, “I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself.” There is something to this mystery of light - in all its forms. The light that is slow enough to become matter and the light beyond the visible spectrum. All creation fluctuations of light and warmth. Meet the moon through the looking glass. We are a window, a lens. A vision waiting to be seen.

Full Mask Moon

The moon is full today. A snow storm is coming. The storms seem to be coming on just less than a seven day cycle. The moon remains in roughly that of  twenty-eight days. These rhythms are not arbitrary. Neither those of the snow nor of the moon. I spoke to a baby today and tried to smile with my eyes, for I had on a mask. She was searching for the words a face speaks - hearing only sounds from my larynx was clearly insufficient. She managed a smile nonetheless, perhaps appreciative of my efforts. It is a shame to lose faces and smiles and dimples and cheekbones lifting and lips quivering and chins. We take off our masks to look in solitude at the moon and walk the snow-muffled streets. We hope we haven't lost too much or forgotten the way back. There is illumination in the full moon, snow covered night.

The River

The leaves are changing. It seems autumn has finally arrived here on the western plains. The trees quiver in deep yellow and lose their leaves reluctantly. While running this week, I crossed over the South Platte River and was struck by its beauty. Even in the shadows of factories and paper mills, half-abandoned strip malls and frontage roads, the river runs on, white foam in its eddies, navy waves and shimmering sunlight dancing in its ripples. For a flash of a moment I was transported to a time when the river was nestled in the high grasses and trees along its banks in a time before today’s people came and burdened the landscape with our machinations and creations. It was simple and pleasant. And while these writings are intended to paint pictures of the future making itself available in the present, the past seemed to call to me and ask that I share in its legacy. I have heard it said that sadness is dwelling in the past and fear is dwelling in the future. I have to actively resist succumbing to sadness when I think about the past, especially in terms of the natural world. Sure, humans have always been humans, silly and violent, beautiful and shortsighted, but I can’t help but imagine a time when the natural world was more abundant and vibrant, quiet yet threatening. In all this idealized dreaming and lamenting upon a past gone, a forest destroyed, an ocean plasticked, there rolls the South Platte River. It still meanders through the high plains on its descent from the Rocky Mountains, freckled with golden leaves from aspen trees and cottonwoods. It still shimmers in the sun until it meets with the North Platte and together, now one, they persist until they meet the Missouri, carrying Colorado snow melt and cow manure and fertilizer into the Mississippi and on into the Gulf of Mexico. The persistence is profound and heartening. The air is crisp and finally breathable. The trees truly stunning. The river immaculate, still running, the future beckoning, downstream.

New Clouds

There is a new type of cloud. At least here on the near plains east of the Rocky Mountains in August and September. At least new to me. It rises like a vague wall from the western horizon. The mountains are hidden behind this veil of cloud, even the faces of the front range only fifteen or twenty miles away. The cloud ascends as one mass up to where I would have to begin to lift my head to follow it up into the sky with my gaze. There it forms a bulbous, undulating edge, similar to that of a cumulus cloud but less defined and substantial. But the cloud also seems to leak out over everything within view. Haze might be the word for it, but that doesn’t quite provide an adequate description. It is more like a fine mist completely lacking in moisture. The sun even seems to be shy in the presence of such atmospheric conditions, though in light only. It has no reservations in providing the necessary heat to complete the sensation of living inside a wood-fired brick oven. This macabre seen is of course created by the wild fires in California and Oregon, perhaps augmented by some burning on the western slope of the Rockies and the creation of ozone from industry and automobiles. It has become relentless and predictable. Lately we hear less of how to prevent such fires, such clouds, such air. Rather we are searching for ways to mitigate the effects- air filters, less outdoor exercise, drive less. The orange of the sun as it descends through this cloud toward the horizon is intimidating, even while stunning in its beauty. There is a nearly imperceptible smell as well, that surely is recognized by the olfactory nerves and stimulates some subtle cascade of hormones signaling danger. Perhaps in the future such signals will be dulled down, perhaps will not reach the fight, flight or freeze responses. And perhaps, this will allow us more freedom to see one another as human, to attend to one another with compassion and the undeniable understanding of our interconnectedness. This summer, I was in New York City, playing frisbee in Prospect Park, and my eyes were burning from the smoke from California, thick as a Manhattan fog. As we awaken, the earth listens, hears, as do the angels, cherubim, seraphim, the clouds their bodies. Awaiting the attention of the humans, calling from the future.

Returning to the Future

It’s time to return to considering the future in our today. I’m trying to ingest all that is happening right now in the world and parse the ransom note of news and current events and upheaval and discord and find something worth saying, something with at least the slightest poetic bent, something speaking with clarity through it all. Sitting with my family today, I finished my bowl of beans and rice with fresh tomatoes from our garden and cheddar cheese from Costco and salsa from the health food store, and I noticed one small rose waving in the wind. I saw it through our front window. The rose bush is most likely quite old; it was here when we moved in several years ago. I tend to it, prune it, water it. It mostly blossomed much earlier in the season, more toward the end of spring, and I am not sure what this rose is doing. What gall to attempt to bloom now, in the middle of August when all around it are the withering remnants of roses long past-the bush is now mostly thorns and leaves. The persistence of nature is certainly something real. Tonight I also spent nearly an hour pulling weeds from the woodchipped walkways of my backyard, walkways that bring me a sense of ease when they are free from weeds, walkways both my eyes and my feet can follow to flowerbeds and vegetable garden, garage and water descending over rocks. The weeds, though not nearly so beautiful as a small mid-August august rose, are equally if not more impressive in their resilience and craftiness and persistence. I can hardly believe the reproductive and bountiful prowess of these damned bindweeds. One really must give them their due respect. It is said an anti-cancer drug is derived from bindweed. I have not heard such accolades for the rose. Alas, this is truly a diversion from all that is going on outside the confines of my small home and yard to which I tend and occupy my overwhelmed consciousness, but it is also a picture of that which will thrive in the future. Yes, roses will continue to bloom, though maybe smaller and on a different schedule, and plants like the bindweed and the Siberian Elm, otherwise known as the weed tree, will flourish in a world that is hotter and drier, that is burning and concrete, that is drilled and mined. And we, humans, what shall we do? Follow the bindweed and weed tree into the urban deserts and proliferate through sheer craftiness and unwillingness to quit? For the flower of the bindweed has a beauty too, it is called a wild morning glory. Yet the bindweed doesn’t like competition, a healthy soil and strong plants will push it out, if we can keep those alive. We have choices. They all seem challenging, and they all seem to have a less than wonderful side to them. The rose was smaller, a vibrant pink leaning toward fuchsia, waving in the wind, compact and high upon the fading bush.

Time Travel

Sometime around March of 2020…

Three weeks ago…

The temperature was in the high sixties today. Sunny with an occasional firm breeze and a few passing clouds sheltering the sun from our illness for a few moments. The days continue in this surreal whir of existence. It feels as though there is a muffler on time, and space is mired in a gelatinous film. The weather, nature itself, is deceiving. That hardly seems possible. The city I now call home has ordered us to Stay at Home or Shutter in Place. We’re allowed to run and hike and walk and ride our bikes, so long as we stay six feet away from other human beings and don’t spit or sneeze or cough or high velocity single nostril project snot on them. We’re also allowed to do essential business such as buy food or alcohol or weed or hardware or lumber or a toilet or go to the hospital.

Today…

That feels like an eternity ago. Not much has changed other than our minds and emotional content. More people have died. Many have been sick. Many more are and have been healthy. People seem to be doing what they understand to be their civic duty. We pray or hope or wear masks and gloves or stay home or work in the garden or all of the above. We try not to be afraid.

Some time between…

I walked out my front door tonight, a being confounded by the news and health and illness, absorbed in my thoughts, in a clutching embrace with my own feelings, and as I stepped down from the threshold onto my porch, I looked up. The early evening sky was shimmering with astral glory. Venus in the western sky glowed like an illuminated crystal, slightly to the south stood Orion, proud and gallant, the waxing crescent moon comfortably between the two. I was overcome with a merging of awe and shame, as if I was receiving the gentlest scolding from a benevolent and stunningly powerful force saying, “We’re still here.” I felt small. The world and our troubles felt small, though not insignificant. This compassionate force was not belittling the suffering and the challenges of our human race or of our planet earth. It was simply reminding me there was more out there. More working in grandest harmonies than my feeble consciousness could decipher or encompass with my paltry feelings or intellect.

A Spring Snow

On the first day of spring, snow fell wet and heavy, a blanket to cover us from all that lives between us. It was quiet, not as cold as it looked. One could almost forget all that is living in the world right now, the invisible palpable fear of the collective. I tried to smile at people in the grocery store, faces hesitant but desperately longing for contact. Stay six feet away but for the sake of all that is holy look me in the eye and affirm that I am human. That was what I heard them saying. Some of them. Others seemed thankful they now had an excuse to remain separate, isolated, obscure. This type of snow weighs down the trees so the branches hang low, reach down to brush your shoulder, drop a clump of snow between the back of your head and the collar of your jacket; a branch that is usually over your head as you walk down the sidewalk now stands before you in bold defiance of the new laws of the land. The snow melts quickly, and puddles from street car snow melt reach up and grab your pant leg. Overgrown pumpkin size clumps of slushy icy snow linger in the street. All once dusty dirt, once revealed beneath the snow, is mud. It is difficult to walk, in grocery stores and alleyways, in spaces once deemed public now condemned, on sidewalks past dog-walkers and through the slurry of our concern and uncertainty. The grass is greener now, days after the spring snow covered it. It did not relent in pursuing its aspirations. Children play in puddles and mud and tromp through warm snow with wet sneakers. It is spring after all.

Rusty Attempt to Start Again Amidst All This

Well, now it’s been nearly two years since I have written, and we find our world in the midst of a “pandemic.” I am out of practice. My writing is choppy and unsure of itself. Yesterday, as I rode my bicycle home from the school where I teach and where my own children will someday be attending- the school that will now be closed for the next four weeks, perhaps more, I noticed a dark mist resting on and below the mountains in the west. It drew my attention each time the streets allowed an unobstructed view - most of the larger east-west blocks, where no tall buildings stood in the way. When I turned right, toward the mountains, onto the street perpendicular to my own, a sharp stream of light illuminated a portion of that dark mist and the mountains just behind it, pouring down from the heavens. The color was orange or rose or peach with golden hints- more red than a honey bee- like the sun but softer, touchable. There was a sharp line between the dark mist and the wash of light. I did not stop and stare, or take the time to observe in stillness. I haven’t done that in some time. Times like these the stream of the future coming toward us is blinding, deafening, immediate, a wave through a flooding mine hundreds of feet within the earth, and perfectly harmonious, a Caribbean clear picture of all we are manifesting as a human race.

The Three Gnomes

Some time last year, in the midst of teaching a middle school math class, I began a story that had no content but began like this: "Once upon a time, there were three gnomes." For some reasons, this story which had no content, acquired a rather existential import for one of the students. Now that student is moving on from my school and preparing to move toward high school, graduating in a sense. So, I finished the story and will give it to him tomorrow. I thought I would share it with you because he is the future, a canary in the coal mine, a picture of childhood attempting to merge into maturity, a modern American cultural prodigy laden with this country's often questionable attributes. I wonder if such things like this help.

     Once upon a time there were three gnomes. They were brothers and lived deep in the earth in a beautiful home their father had built for them from the finest stones and gems in all the earth. Of the three brothers, the oldest was very smart, quick-witted with a sharp sense of humor, but he rarely paid enough attention to what was happening around him to put his superlative intellect to use. The middle brother, on the other hand, was always paying attention, but he was very moody. One minute he could be on top of the world with joy and excitement and the next minute he might barely be able to move so sad and gloomy was he. Finally, the youngest brother may have been the most able all three brothers but he was the laziest gnome anyone in all the land had ever met. He could scarcely be bothered to lift a finger to clean his room, never mind to do chores around the house. But one day, a visitor came to call on the three gnomes. She was a beautiful princess who lived in a  castle up above upon the earth, and she needed the help of the three brothers. She told them her own brother, the prince, had been captured by an evil sorcerer who took the shape of a dragon, and the dragon sorcerer was keeping the prince high high in his guarded tower. The princess said that the sorcerer told her only these three gnomes could save the prince, but they would all need to show a side of themselves they had never shown before. So, entranced by the beauty and elegant language of the princess, the three brothers followed her up to the earth to challenge the sorcerer. When they arrived at the tower, there indeed was the ugliest, loudest, smelliest dragon they could have imagined, and he smiled and hissed with glee to see the three gnomes approaching. “Ah, my three gnomes, I was hoping you would be wiling to give me a bit of sport. Each of you will have to complete a task for me, and if you complete all three, I will release the prince and go off to my own lair within the mountains far far from here, but if you do not, I will eat all three of you and have the prince and princess for dessert!” 

First the eldest had to solve a riddle. As the dragon began to talk, the oldest gnome couldn't be bothered to even pay attention, so his younger brother, very anxious and nervous about the whole ordeal, moody as he was, pinched his elder brother to keep him paying attention. “What is the word that once you say it, it is gone?” “Easy! Silence!” said the eldest gnome much to the dragon’s dismay. Then, to the middle brother the dragon sorcerer said, “For you, I have a special challenge. Before your eyes will flash scenes from the lives of human beings- death and dismay, tragedies and horrific pains, joyous miracles and ecstatic triumphs- and you must not laugh out loud nor shed a tear. I will allow for a smile perhaps and a glistening redding of the eye, a lump in the throat, but no more!” The middle brother was quite afraid, but his younger brother, lazily hoping he might not have to do any trials if his older brothers both passed their tests, gave his older brother great confidence and assured him all would be well, and before he knew it, the middle brother was lost, as if in a dream, immersed in the lives of human beings, full of all the trials, hilarities and amazements a life can hold. He stayed calm, composed, inwardly moved perhaps, but able to hold back tears and stifle outrageous laughter. Suddenly, the scenes were gone, and he was back before the dragon sorcerer who was growing angrier with each gnome’s success. Finally, the youngest gnome, the laziest gnome in all the land, was called to his task. “You, young gnome,” called the sorcerer, “must run full speed around the tower three times before the setting of the sun.” The youngest gnome heaved a weighted sigh, but with seeing the eager faces of his brothers and the pleading looks from the princess, he agreed. Without further warning, “Begin!” called the dragon sorcerer. Off went the gnome running his fastest pace as he saw the sun was dipping oh so close to the horizon. Around the tower once the young gnome made it, but as he began his second lap, he grew tired and the tower seemed to be growing in size! The bottom edge of the sun edged slightly below the horizon as the gnome, slowing nearly to a walking pace, losing all strength of mind and body to carry on and with a cramp growing in his ribs, rounded the tower finally completing his second lap. Now, in his third lap, with a glimpse of his brothers, the frightful dragon and the entrancing princess, he felt a surge of strength pulse through him. But now the tower had grown to an unwieldy size! The gnome could hear the laughing of the dragon sorcerer and the calls of his brothers and the fair princess. The young gnome clenched his jaw and lifted his stride as he circled the ever widening tower. As the sun was about to disappear beneath the wooded horizon, the young gnome crossed before the dragon, collapsed upon the ground and heard the anguished roar of the dragon and the cheers of his brothers, the princess and the prince, now freed from his tower. The dragon sorcerer angrily flew off, back to his lair deep in the hidden mountains, the prince and princess returned to their castle and soon grew to rule their land with justice and grace, and the three gnomes decided to build their own fine home upon the earth, where they could always see the castle in the distance and always remember the day they were asked to be more than they had ever been before.

Three months later...

It's been several months since I last wrote. The last post was in the middle of February, and I attempted an entry in mid-March that simply would not allow itself to be published at the time. I think I had to stop writing because I was beginning to devour myself by ingesting too much content from the world around me. A portion of my intangible selfness entered a process of decay as my voiced perspective became increasingly tinged with negativity and hopelessness. Beauty became a caricature of the vital presence I hold it to be. It could no longer enter into the writing as the underlying yet rarely acknowledged hero of the epic fairy tale of life on earth. It's not that I no longer noticed, or ceased to strive to maintain consciousness of the warbly song of the red-winged blackbird, or the changeable moods of the mountains and the way they taunt the plains over which they dominate, or the shimmery intensity of people with intensely shimmering blue eyes - but certain forces were grappling to hold it at bay, struggling to stunt its voice. But I'm getting back on the horse- for if there is anything for which the future is asking, which the inevitable tomorrows demand, it is the preservation of beauty and the development of the capacity to differentiate between that which is ugly and that which is beautiful- including the states and sentiments of our own psyches. Much of what I was writing for the last entry landed more on the ugly side- but it ended mid-thought with my attempt to redeem the anger, the insensibility, with a glimpse of nature from running with the future: In the marsh, perched on cattails, Redwing Blackbirds called to me and my son, called enough we had to stop...

An Echo of Joy in a Tragic Future

There has been another shooting and tragic massacre. This one at a school. I read today it is the 18th shooting at a school in the United States this year. Eight that resulted in injury or death. Two were suicides. Some were "accidental" firings of weapons. 2018. We are not very far into the year at this point. Sometimes I avoid writing about these types of events because I feel I have so very little to add to the dialogue, to the outrage, to the sadness, the wrenching sensation of hopelessness and frustration- so little to contribute to the attempts at consolation to those grieving. But I am a teacher. At a school. Vague flashes of imaginations of a rifle-wielding younger man coming on to our campus and wreaking havoc arise in and dissipate from my conscoiusness with the potency of a heated glowing splinter of metal laid on flesh, searing and cooling, blistering. And then I think of my own young child, who, in the not too distant future, I will be taking to school. So I decided to write with hope for the process of writing to provide some amelioration, or some revelation, or some healing balm in the form of an image summoned through the merging of language, imagination and the senses' apprehension of the gifts of the natural world. But I am having the hardest time lifting above this one. It’s like the experiences are building one upon another. The only heraldings I hear from the future are so bleak I want to ignore them. All I see are subtle wars of fear; politicians reduced to stick-figure pawns of forces of vice and greed so much more complex and grand than the mirage of governmental systems; desperate journalists starving and mad for truth; artists weeping in pools of beauty melting before their eyes or grasping for it as it fades in the din of argument and industrialization; mothers and fathers clinging to their children paralyzed in fear or enraged into violent reactionism; revolutionaries confounded and paralyzed by the myriad foes they face -- and yet, somewhere out of this socio-scape I hear the echo of laughter, innocent and true. It emanates as though from the depths of an abandoned subway tunnel. There is a faint glow accompanying it, like a very small candle flickering around a corner, the flame not visible. I can’t tell if it is the fading remnants of what we once knew as joy or the undying force of humor and optimism fueled by, as Dostoevsky says, in rough translation, “an heroic deed of brotherly and loving communion.” If you have a chance to find a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, I recommend reading Book 6, Chapter 2, entitled, From the Life of the Hieromonk and Elder Zosima, Departed in God, Composed from his Own Words by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. There is a quote I memorized many years ago and save for times like these. Save for times when I need to remember the immense potential of individual action and freedom to choose out of a transcendent morality. When I need to remember we are in a time of radically challenging individualism, but it is not a time void of hope. The translations may differ, but I remember it like this:

“There comes a time when a man must rise himself out of the solitariness in an heroic deed of brotherly and loving communion. Even if he does so in the capacity of a holy fool. This in order that the great idea shall not die.”

The future seems to be calling for more holy fools.

Clouds in a Parking Lot

Tonight, just after the sun set, I stood in the parking lot of Whole Foods and observed the clouds. I can only describe the color as a pinkish magenta-though this does not nearly do the activity represented by the dance of light, eye and the visual cortex justice. The stratus clouds in the southern sky were a blanket, drawn back from the horizon, ruffled in subtle waves. When I first parked and walked toward the automatic sliding doors, I turned to see the clouds in their rosy luminescence, but I felt awkward, self-aware, as if there were people noticing this bearded disheveled man in dirty, paint-stained and torn khaki work pants and khaki vest and bland olive green skull-cap staring into the southern and western skies over the parking lot of mid-sized SUV's and hybrids and the hum of I-25 just beyond. So, I turned back toward the doors, my presence demanding their nearly silent sliding compliance. After shopping and buying my four items and returning to the parking lot, however, the sky was even more majestic and my mood even darker. I stood unabashedly and tried to observe the sky without a thought cluttering the perception. I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to allow the color and the forms, the dynamics of the moment, to seep into me- tried to allow the divine wisdom in that collection of moisture diligently refracting the sun's light, forcefully refusing passage to the spectrum of color presented in the dome above, bouncing it around and sending it back toward earth. I stood for an immeasurable amount of time, minutes or seconds, and then my attention was drawn to the mountains in the west. There, a tincture of the color present in the blanket of clouds above glowed with a vitality generally reserved for living things. There, I imagined, the sun had just glided behind the mountains and was allowing one last revelry, a call to the clouds above, an invitation to continue in the glorious display. To bring this moment, this moment soaked in an attempt to be completely in the present, to bring this moment into relationship to the future- in searching for the call from that mysterious tomorrow- all I have is the concept of hope. The hope that the relationship between human beings and beauty and attention will prevail over all that is dark, morbid and immoral working in the world today. The hope that people will continue to stop in parking lots and stare into the sky in wonder and perhaps see the reflection of their own divinity, the colors of their own soul, in a blanket of clouds and the echoing call of the sun beyond the horizon.

Magical Thinking (Kind of)

I'm starting this one with no idea where to go. I've been thinking lately about dreams. Not dreams that come during sleep, but those dreams we dream when we are wide awake or in a contemplative mood and staring off into nowhere, the kind of dream that comes with thought and introspection and is wiling to wander into the ideal and impossible and ludicrous. Dreams of walking in flip-flops and peaceful revolutions based on reallocation of wealth and equally distributed empowerment with access to quality education and resources for mental, emotional and physical health. Dreams in which cooperative businesses are started and lobbyists are influencing lawmakers in the interests of the underserved and unseen majority. Dreams and ideals fueled by art, by words and music informing and inspiring - colors and forms entering into the human being as healing archetypes- silently bringing transformation to those least expecting it and perhaps most resistant. Today is one of those days when these dreams are all I have, all that keep me thinking through the day, keep me from reacting in purely violent and aggressive acts against the perceived stupidity and selfishness of the mass of humanity - me included. And yet, there's more to this than these dreams of social righteousness. There is something magical, transcendental, spiritual in its etymological sense as of the wind or breath or the breath of god, something moving through unseen, ever-changing, sourceless yet part of a reciprocity, a process, a dynamic interaction of forces. This is the dream really keeping me afloat and simultaneously driving me mad, that there is truly something not perceivable by our limited and commonly recognized senses allowing this madness to all make sense, to have a trajectory, an arc, a climax, a denouement. Out of a fissure in the highway of the future sprouts a cotyledon of devastating and luminous potential, in a delicate exchange with the atmosphere, in the sublime transformation of light into matter, its roots unhindered in their search for meaning and nutrition, its leaves enveloping and shading, its flower, ultimately, radiant with fragrant emanations, its seed a promise of dreams of social and moral justice and magical events and mysterious interventions.

Silent Moon Epiphany

Untethered, the moon hovers of its own will, growing in size, halfway between half full and full. The frost has moved east and plummeted into single digits and below zero, winds that hurt. These are dark nights, as we move toward the epiphany, as we descend from a birth in the physical to a birth in the spirit. Starting on earth and moving down toward the center where light is waiting. There should be an opening then, if the work is done adequately. The work of tearing away. The work of listening with the intention of profoundly attentive silence. 

Refugees of the Future Heart

My path has led me to a community of refugees, some from other countries, some from the streets of our own fair nation. I have been tutoring a young man from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is a high school student at an independent school, studying Goethe's Faust and the optics of Edwin H. Land. Tonight I had the privilege of hearing him tell of a small part of his childhood in Africa. His assignment was to write something relating to the work of Emerson and Thoreau. We chose Thoreau's essay, "Walking," and I prompted this young man to tell me of his memories of walking in his own country. The first memory to arise was of running away from home to avoid a stern lashing from his mother for a misdeed apparently serious enough to provoke such a punishment. The story unfolded cautiously, as if the memories were timid, peering out from behind the tropical trees of the Congo, unsure if it was safe to come out and live again, live in words and feelings. As they stutteringly approached and allowed themselves to be revealed, I walked with him on streets, roads, paths, muddy from the rains, past a river than ran brown from far away up in the mountains, past the field where soccer was played, with birds flying overhead, no, no, we can't see the birds, we hear them in the forest, calling and then we met a man who told us to get cigarettes then stole our shoes and we had to return to our mother crying over our stolen shoes, and she was stern, but loving. and we were not beaten for our earlier transgression, the running away and the stolen shoes retribution enough. I was transported but I could not decipher the movement of feeling within this young man as his tale unraveled. It was a time and a place so far from both of us, and we so far from one another even while we sat close enough on a small bench in the kitchen of a home created for people displaced from their own home that our shoulders touched. In this experience lived the future I both fear and for which I have hope. An uncomfortable future in which the number of individuals unable to remain in their homes and forced to flee to other countries, foreign and strange lands, continues to increase at a pace nearly unmanageable- and yet, a future in which human beings from vastly different environments and situations and circumstances can sit at a kitchen table sharing stories, offering help in small yet unmeasurably significant doses, enlivening and warming hearts in ripples and echoes. These challenges the future is offering will be opportunities for us to grow into true humans, humans swelling toward our full capacities as compassionate and empathetic beings capable of awakening and finding ourselves within the consciousness of other people, attending to their suffering and knowing it, and by seeing it and knowing it, somehow healing wounds and recognizing the illusion of our separateness and feeling our bare feet, our toes filling with mud as we walk the road home, where our mother is waiting, angry but full of love for her children.

Untangling Knots for the Future

Today I spent several hours untangling knots and unwinding and winding kite strings. Though I was also occupied in other listening based activities while I de-snarled, my hands and eyes and thinking were predominantly occupied by this Penelopean undertaking. Throughout the day I tried to understand why this task, on this day, this day before the Winter Solstice, why this task was in my hands. There must be some underlying meaning. These particular kite strings have been untouched and tangled for at least six months, but today I just had to get them clear. I did think of cutting them a few times to make the job easier, but I rather persevered. All the knots came out. I rewound each string neatly, tightly, with a spiral hand motion moving away from me, down, up closer to me and away again. It is true there was some satisfaction in this clearing, in the untangling, in the "fixing," but the real challenge is in the why of it. These are the times for which I have been trained to get quiet, ask the question and wait for the answers to come from another person or an interaction or a newspaper article or anything really but it requires attending. Sitting here, writing about it helps too. There are so many snarls to untangle in the world right now. The new tax bill that just happens to include a provision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. More fire in California and sixty degree days with hardly any snow in the Colorado mountains. I was so violently ill three days ago that thinking too complex thoughts, thoughts that required attention to several steps, a process, such thinking invoked nausea and dizziness. I have never encountered a virus so poignant and potent. The very ground seems made of gravy and the highways are museums of wrecked cars and displays of flashing light sophistication. I used to get high and be paranoid and now I'm clear like a monk and I'm paranoid everyone's high- high on weed, but more high on drugs served with scripts and handed over a counter at CVS- high like they don't even give          a                   shit. This has gone nowhere, the kite strings lie in the kite bag, clean and wound with precision, the country's high on opiates and anti-depressants and power and cash, tomorrow is the darkest day of the year, this perhaps the longest night of the year, I repel into the caverns of my soul in search of a light I hear dwells there, inextinguishable and profound in its luminosity. I untangle knots in kite strings because the children love to fly kites. They throw their arms in the air, mouths agape, voicing sounds of awe when they take flight. They chase them and throw them in the air and revel in their crashes to the earth. They are winded and red-cheeked and arguing and laughing and sharing and all things good about childhood and humanity. There they are, the colors are those of the rainbow, they truly dance in the sunlight, on the wind, the children and kites tethered by strings taught, nearly imperceptible against the blue sky, unencumbered by knots, free to unwind with a gust or the daring running of a child.

Wind and Leaves in Santa Fe

I am lying on a couch in a casita in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A small flame fueled by a manufactured easy-lighting "log" burns in a brick and stucco fireplace. The boards of the aged wood floors have allowed gaps to form between them from the high desert retreat of moisture, and they dip and roll from years of foundational settling. My wife and child lie sleeping in an adjoining room and the sound of a movie rumbles from the other room in which my sister-in-law and niece-in-law are probably also asleep. An occasional car or truck moans by on the narrow, short street outside. I haven't much to say as of late in the vein of social commentary. It seems as though the future is hiding out afraid it might reveal a picture stark and morbid. The present is one painted to the frame in vibrant color and irritated forms, discomforting in its harmony. The news is full of sexual and moral impropriety and depravity, fiscal abuse, legal flaccidity- it is difficulty listening. And yet, children still laugh and swing from monkey bars. They chase one another and scream and giggle in absolute delight untethered by an adult version of the world. There are farmers who have devoted their lives to a way of growing food and raising animals that rejuvenates the land and nurtures human beings. There are water-purifying devices being engineered, manufactured and delivered to places in the world where clean water could save millions of lives. There are billionaires funding windfarms to provide electricity without depleting non-renewable resources. There are mothers all over this planet hugging their children and fathers holding toddlers' hands and grandparents reading stories, and here, in Santa Fe, a fire burns in a brick and stucco fireplace, the moon shyly glows behind a thin veil of high icy moisture and a child and his mother sleep, warm and waiting. These are the rituals of today allowing us to wake tomorrow and know god in a rustling leaf drawn tumbling along the street by an unseeable breeze and to be utterly thankful for the wind and for leaves.

Giving Thanks for Tomorrow

Thanksgiving dinner was turkey and stuffing and cranberries and a vegan loaf. There were pies and wine and cousins, aunts, uncles, three generations. One of our family members has been diagnosed with cancer- a cancer known for its rapid urging toward death- so Thanksgiving was not as joyous as it can be, nor as boisterous, nor was the majority of the family together, with illness and weariness and grief now more interactive guests at our festive tables. Thanksgiving seemed a blip, a beat, a phrase in the slowly dictated paragraph of a family member's finite and proclaimed journey toward the threshold between earthly existence and that which lies beyond. There are different ideas about this "beyond." The research with which I occupy much of my otherwise unoccupied time tells of a continual journey from life to life with a persistent kernel of selfhood determined to grow and learn at any cost in future lives. My imaginations and ponderings often dwell in the space between death and a new birth where beings interact, where people choose the lessons they will learn and suffer the pains of those they have wronged. For so long have I worked with these ideas and experienced palpable confirmations of them that, in a time like this, the line between this world of the flesh and that of the spirit fold into one another filled with beauty, sound, color, weaving dynamic forces. I know how hard it is to lose someone you love- how difficult it is to find them across the threshold, the abandonment, anger perhaps. And I also know they are present, confronting their fears and longing for you to still know them and longing to help if only we ask. There is a comfort in that knowing. It doesn't cure the sadness- nor should it- but it provides an anchor and an imagination of possibility. Tomorrow will come and the sun will rise as the train blows its whistle, beckoning from a place far from lonely holding all you ever imagined.

Will the Rock Keep Rolling When the Legends Die?

The danger of starting a project like this is the unknowing of where it will lead, the utility of it, the senselessness of it, the shouting into the void of it. I've undertaken several artistic projects in my life thus far, and they have all fallen with the mediocre bounce of a rubber ball hardened by extended exposure to the sun or like a tennis ball hit too many times and chewed by a royal standard poodle - perhaps fun for those interested in play for play sake but somehow unfulfilling in that the bouncing slows quickly and stillness comes and there it lies, without a child or a dog to send it rollicking back into movement. But here we are, still writing, perhaps you are reading this and perhaps the you to whom I refer is someone other than me. And it is in this meandering vein that I ask about the future of art, particularly of music, specifically the music known by some as rock'n'roll. We can not go any further with this discussion without a qualification of terms. A dear friend once explained to me the true beauty of rock'n'roll is that it rocks and it rolls. It doesn't just rock and it doesn't just roll, and for a long time-even to this day a faint flame still burns-for a long time I was sure that rock'n'roll would save the world from its steady decay into materialistic thought, consumption based will control, civilly debilitating avarice, sub-human interactions and immorality in the guise of righteousness. From anomalies like Phish and the Grateful Dead, to the icons of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, to the modern torch-bearers of The Flaming Lips, Beck, Sigur Ros and the National, there seems to be a dwindling understanding of what rock'n'roll is and why it is and why it matters. Then there is also the thought, "Did it ever really matter?" For some, understandably, rock'n'roll music gets confused with the lifestyle choices associated with it such as drug use, careless sexual proclivity and questionable hairstyles. But the music itself, the music I characterize as true rock'n'roll has the ability to be both heartful and angry, to be simultaneously counter-culture and popular culture, to both reject the world from which it comes and embrace the human beings inhabiting that world; it is equally a love poem and raging political/cultural vitriol exuding idealist hope and apocalyptic dread. To paraphrase a quote from Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, "You don't sing a song like 'God Save the Queen' because you hate the English people, you sing a song like 'God Save the Queen' because you love the English people and you're sick and tired of seeing them oppressed." I've carried that quote in memory for years. Even though the words may have been slightly different, and perhaps the Sex Pistols could have used a little more roll with their rock, that truly expressed the intention, the will, the ideals behind the music known as rock'n'roll. With this in mind, I've been listening for a call from the future to see if there is any hope on the horizon for a new wave of compassionate and peacefully revolutionary music makers to take to the scene and allow the public a version of freedom nearly absent from today's world. I know there are new albums from the Flaming Lips and the National; I know Neil is still doing it and Bob Dylan continues on his never-ending tour. But I haven't heard or heard of anything new that could even compare to the unprecedented impact of such bands as the Grateful Dead or the Beatles or as musically ground-breaking as Pink Floyd or the Beach Boys or Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. I can't even imagine what life as a young man growing up in the United States of America would have been like without these icons as mostly living, breathing, even touring realities in the environs of my time's popular culture. My pubescent feeling life was defined by giants such as U2 and Bruce Springsteen. Oh, alas, perhaps I'm just getting old, but I do try to pay attention and as a teacher I am around young people every day - the music world, the rock'n'roll world has certainly changed. I feel lucky to have had these figures, this music, this mythology of revolution and love-driven new jerusalem consciousness. As for the future of rock'n'roll, to quote Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, "My hands are in the air, And that's where they always are, You're fucked if you do, and you're fucked if you don't. Five stop mother superior rain." It will rock or it will roll or it will all just fade to black and live as a memory of something that once was on planet earth for historians to study. Or maybe it already saved the world, and our planet would truly be inhabitable without it having ensouled and inspired millions of people who make the world tolerable today. We'll have to ask the historians of the future, when time has made the arc of culture clear, and perhaps some stiff Social Studies teacher in a public middle school will be forced to read from a text book so his students can pass their standardized tests and become productive members of the future cultural landscape, "So you see students, in the late 20th and early 21st century, it was actually rock'n'roll that saved the world."

Owls Peering Out from the Future

The night before last we heard a noise in the adjacent room as my family finished dinner. The room is in a state of unfinished renovation from a sun-room that may have housed a hot tub at some time in the one hundred seven year life of our small brick home. It has pieces of drywall and screws and tools and spray cans of insulation and a ladder and dust upon the floor. When we first heard the noise, we didn't know from where it was coming, but we quickly ascertained the general location and out I went with headlamp in hand to investigate. I was a bit nervous and excited, not sure what type of intruder I would encounter. I have had to battle bats in the past in a house in Vermont- a bat would visit our basement every February until it made its way upstairs one last time. I took the advice of my cousin who was a police officer in the Bronx and worked the night shift from 11pm to 7 or 8am and often had to answer calls from frantic citizenry about the bat in their apartment. My cousin said, "Dude, people would call all the time about these fucking things. Some cops won't deal with it, tell 'em it's not their job, but I always go. This is what you do dude. Bats just fly around in circles, the same path every time, so I would say, 'Hey, lady, you got a broom I can use? And I need a towel or a blanket or something.' And you watch where it is flying, like, in the room, and it goes around a few times and then you know where it's gonna go so you just whack it. That just stuns 'em, so they fall to the ground, then you throw the towel or blanket on it and stomp on it. Then they say, 'What am I gonna do with this now?' and I say, 'Listen lady, I took care of the bat, ok? Now you get rid of it.'" I took his advice, and it worked just like he said. Except I was wearing a motorcycle helmet, leather jacket, long wrist-covering ski gloves and a scarf, and I didn't have the nerve for or interest in stomping on it, so I carried it in the blanket outside and let it go. It flew into the night, and I haven't seen it since. So I was thinking of bats, when I went outside. When I shined the flashlight into the room, I saw a shadowy figure flying in the abandoned, half renovated mystery sun room. I thought, "Bat." However, my light suddenly came to rest on a feathered critter hiding between the glass door and some small size strangely angled drywall. It was not a bat. It turned toward me and revealed round yellowish eyes with large dilated pupils. It was a small owl. After looking it up in the bird book, I think it was a screech owl, either western or eastern. We are on the boarder of the two ranges here on the plains before the rockies. I quickly came back inside to tell my family, and when I went back outside, it spooked and flew out a high window through the lattice work and into the night. Owls are known to be powerful omens, either of bad or good, depending who you ask. Later in the night, I smelled an enchanting smell like incense and the presence of a being I've known before. Only time will tell what portent the owl brought from the future. There was a certain magic moving through life this week. The veil between the spirit and we so thin this time of year. I do my best to listen when an owl comes to visit.