Leaving early

On September 1, 2001, Mr. Point was wedged next to the window of a puddle jumper flying over the Cascade Mountains. Next to him in economy was an overweight happy couple anticipating their future first class flight to London out of Georgia. Ten days before people on, from and inside cells placed long distance calls from caves.

“We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends,” said the wife, an alcoholic, “and then,” her husband chimed in, “we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food. I’d like to go to Costa del Sol. I’ve heard the culture is wide open, if you know what I mean,” rubbing his secret jewels and winking to the stranger.

His spouse wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh. Their combined girth was conspicuous consumption. They exceeded their weight limit. The scales of justice were balanced in their favor as they spilled wealth.

“What do you do for a living?” her husband asked.

“My friends call me Mr. Point. I work for The Department of Wandering Ghosts Ink. 24/7,” he said with a straight face. He was a survivor, Vietnam 1969.

“Busy, busy, busy,” he laughed. “Yes, I am a mercenary of love, an unemployed fortune teller if you must really know. You might remember me from the Academy of Pain and Anger Management if you have a need to know. If your top-secret security clearances are valid. The more you know the less you need. 

“I’m heading to Morocco to meet my female nomad lover and extraneous fascinating strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the Extraordinary Rendition Program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer suspected terrorists to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fake companies.”

The shadow of Little Wing, a weaver, passed them.

“If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they boil them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap or country music twenty-four hours a day to drive them crazy. Stale bread and rancid water. A grisly business, but hey, it’s a paycheck.

“We also set up off shore accounts for clandestine agencies, or fronts if you will. We collect raw opium in Afghanistan, process it in Asian labs so street addicts get their fix. Along the way we collect Chinese harvested internal organs and upright pianos to sell in Hong Kong. The market is diversifying. Pick em’ up and lay em’ down. No women or kids. We have to draw the line somewhere, eh? Business profit has never been better. Ain’t nothin but the blues baby.”

They cut him off after this truth. 

His one-way air ticket to Morocco and Spain promised another road, village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic potentials. The KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, principle. Just leaving was a wise decision as it turned out. Speaking of history.

“Beyond, beyond the great beyond,” he’d whispered to someone, somewhere on the spinning rock when they asked him where was he was going and why he did what he did with the who, when, and howdy doody yankee doodle dandy stick a feather in your cap crap paradigms.

A Century is Nothing

Kalapuya

“I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. Dialects of ancestors who lived here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In the forest near the river all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.

“I am blessed to welcome you here. You have walked along many paths of love to reach me.

“My dirt path is narrow and smooth in places, rocky in others. I am the soil under your feet. I feel your weight, your balance - your weakness and your strength. I hear your heart beating as my ancestors pounded their ceremonial drums. I feel the tremendous surging force of your breath extend into my forest. Wind accepts your breath.

“I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. I am the oak, the fir and pine trees spreading like dreams upon your outer landscape. I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent in the forest hearing trees nudge each other. “Look,” they say, “someone has returned.”

“I love the way you absorb the song of brown body thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet-throated song you hear without listening. At night two owls sing their distant song and their music fills your ears with mystery and love.

“I am warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time. I am the spider’s web dancing with diamond points of light. I am the rough fragile texture of bark you gently remove before connecting the edge of an axe with wood. You carry me through my forest your flame creates heat of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the odor of forest in your nostrils filling your lungs. It is sweet.

“I am the cold rain and wet snow and hot sun, and four seasons. I am yellow, purple, red, blue, and orange flowers from brown earth.

“Language cannot be separated from who you are and where you live.

“I say this so you will remember everything in this forest. I took care of this place and now your love has the responsibility with respect and dignity and mindfulness.”

Source: A Century is Nothing.

Awake

"Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore."
 - Stefan Zweig

emotional algebra  Read more…

Every August

“Tell us a story,” said kids.

"I’ll do my best,” said a Zen monk. "I heard this story from a friend in The Windy City and it’s stranger than creative nonfiction.

"Funny how it comes around just about this time every year, just like last August. Somebody said August is the cruelest month. Easily the hottest. A local 15-year old girl killed herself yesterday with a single shot to the head. Makes you wonder who, when, where, how and big WHY.

“Last August it was M in old Chi town. The perfusionist. She called a wrong number out of desperation and I inherited the inevitable task of talking her through the drama of her life.

"I answered the phone in Tacoma and kept her on the suicide hot line. It produced basic peace of mind for her. I created poems and a well-done intense piece entitled The Last Several Pages about a book she was reading. She said was going to join a procrastinators club but kept putting it off. She finally settled down with an older divorced real estate salesman.”

"Walking through fires," said Omar, the blind author of A Century is Nothing.

"It was a tough one. All about listening, a lot of listening, recognizing faces of fear, seeing truth. Letting go. Moving on. Finding balance.

"So, another August rolled around again. Out of curiosity I called one of those 900 relationship toll-free numbers and left a message: Independent orphan seeks open-minded spirituality adept woman for casual relationship and friendship.

"Did you get any response?" said Omar.

"Three. The Relationship Express hummed along the tracks stopping at stations named Loneliness, Emptiness, Friendship, mid-life Crisis, Ticking Time Bombs, Endless Conversations, Rhapsody of the Disenchanted, Still Looking After All These Years, and Where’s The One?

"It zoomed past scenic views of Depression, Melancholy, Trust, Hope, Anxiety, Doubt, and Fear as I transited into the listening role with a couple of new women.

"Both from Montana transiting through self- discovery, broken relationships and renewal. We’re riding the range, mending fences, and setting up new parameters. Now I love women, yes sirree, well all right then, but I know better now and it’s just this curious nature of heart and mind to be out there making new connections. I’m not saving anybody.

“All the stations have various levels of becoming. Passengers stuck on levels bang their heads and hearts against transparencies grasping their Gestalt, shattering mirrors and delusions. They work out in private emotional, physical, spiritual fitness centers. Levels replace levels. Each level has a center. The vortex is the equilibrium, the source."

"We are works in progress,” Omar said.

"I’m just doing my work,” I said.

“That’s a powerful statement,” Omar said.

"Yes it is. Now I wouldn’t be the first person to say it’s healing work but I’ve learned to listen.

“Not all the clowns are in the circus. I make it perfectly clear to these kind ladies that I am not in the rescuing business anymore. Nope. No way. Honesty is the best policy and I’m not in the mood to waste their time, my time and our collective energies establishing a Heavy Deep & Real relationship. HDR. The emotional bottom line is they’re looking for a kind, sensitive man who won’t screw around and fuck up their lives. They’ve been cheated on, dumped on and left taking care of the kids. They need someone who will just listen to them without saying, 'I can fix it.' They know what’s what. They know how the world works, how the heart beats. They have their own toolbox. You’ve gotta have a good tool box."

"Tools. Couldn’t agree with you more, " said Omar.

"We’re all passengers on life’s train," said the monk.

It’s the Circus Train!

A fall loon, schools of minnows circle and zoom. I stand in Puget Sound shallows as the Florida circus train rolls north. I yell and wave amid swirling dervishes on granite in rapid ocean tides breathing in and out.

“It’s the circus people.”

“Step right up, under the big Irish bog top!”

People wave from their moving life station. They are the old tired eyed circus veterans standing next to new clowns filming water lap land. They reload memories into instamatics. There are midgets barely able to see over the edge next to sturdy muscular mustached roustabouts. Everything they need in their magic portable city is on rolling stock; water trucks, tents, buses, cages.

There is a bright red ‘For Sale’ sign in a train window. Someone decorated a rolling window with a plant garden spilling into water vapor. Someone displays a stuffed hanging elephant. They are living their dream life on rails. They are caged people living with watered and fed animals.

They have city routines; set it up, do the show with all the temerity of tenacious trainers, take it down, roll mile after mile this gleaming circus waving as the ocean waves a silver fish and one silver sparkles skyward. When they reach the Canadian border they will reverse engines and roll east through Big Sky country toward winterized Florida. Rare dawn light passed sleepy stations, bathed in dew diamonds.

Riding the rails follows our spirit journey.

“The simple way is to listen, stay detached, share and establish levels of responsibility, limitations and boundaries while remaining open to the big picture,” said a monk.

A shadow carrying a candle passed them in the dark.

"Not too much wisdom and not too much compassion," whispered a wandering monk climbing Cold Mountain toward a bamboo cabin sanctuary.

"Who are you?" said a child.

"I am a wandering monk."

"Where are you going?"

"To gather medicinal herbs for tea."

"Would you care to join us later?"

"Yes. We all have (a) ways to go."

"That’s a powerful story. Your friend is onto something there. She touches into what people deal with in their daily lives, their form and their emptiness. It’s not fiction. Or is it? Is it a lie layered with your imagination to make it true?”

"Good question. Omar speaks and writes from the heart-mind. There are people who don’t want to hear this stuff, but say hey kid, they can take it or leave it. I’m willing to take her at her word. It’s about the human condition."

"Well said. Life is something to be lived and not talked about. What say, shall we rest here awhile, enjoy some food, companionship and a siesta?"

Everyone gathered in a sacred circle. It was all light in their interior shamanistic landscape.

Source: A Century is Nothing.

Turkish attitude

Adult Ankara language students said they were tired.

They loved being addicted to a phenobarbital phenomenon reality altering life, taking anti-depressants (Xanax) by mouth. He processed their fear and anxiety.

A national Turkish problem, according to a male psychiatrist is anxiety.

A clinking small musically inclined silver spoon dissolved square sugar cubes made in a factory where the hygiene conditions were abysmal.

We sat in a teahouse filled with Turkish and Iranian carpets, blue amber oil paintings and thick embroidered cushions near a well-thumbed Zen tarot deck. Fortune telling is an art and science depending on a suspicious, auspicious way. We gifted each other the state of relaxation. Reading, feeling, absorbing the future is the process.

These a-dolts eat their fear, humiliation and guilt with yogurt, said Zeynep in Bursa drawing in a Moleskine.