Because the stone is washed by the riverspray, and pine needles litter its surface, the girl walks carefully. As the root-stained water boils through the canyon, its incessant stirring cutting cauldrons in the bedrock, as pebbles are spun around and around and around, the voice of the current is a roar that doesn't pause for breath, is almost a magnetic force, and the girl inches forward to look over the lip into the froth. Inches forward, as the stone itself slopes down into the water, polished and pulled by rising and lowering volume, it's as if (the mother feels, without putting thoughts to the feeling) as if a hand were reaching up to draw her daughter down and in. It is true (the mother knows, without putting feelings to the thoughts) that there are meters of stone before girl and water meet; some is dry; the girl is careful and agile; today is not her day to depart... But knowing is one room of the self; and from another room, decorated by generations of mothers and their losses, a cry rises up of avenging, protecting angels and shouts the girl back from the edge. Her voice is small against the water's fall, it seems a wisp, a whispered plea, a fleck of sound, a seed in a stronger wind.

Her daughter takes a last, almost longing, look into the swirling muscle of the river, and then steps back, one sliding step, another. She looks up, then turns and darts up the avenue of rock, sure-footed as a young goat, carried by her confidence and spring sinew.

An invisible hand releases the mother's throat, breath comes back into the lungs, like a dipper to the well, a deep draught of tannic Upper Peninsula air. She closes her eyes. One breath, two. Something like a flame begins to drain from her arms and legs, as though there were scurrying fire-creatures standing down from action, running back through cracks and crevasses to the deep place inside her. Sky cleared, breeze blew. All was well.

Her daughter jumped up to the point, grabbed the exposed root of a tree, and pulled herself up to where her mother stood. --Did you see how the water made those holes? I threw a stick above the falls, and watched it go down into one after another. It spun around in the last one and couldn't get out.

The mother had seen.

--It was so loud down there, it felt like I was inside a thunderstorm. I couldn't hear a thing!

Even my shout was powerless. The daughter standing there, full of sight and sound, triumphant, untouchable, having ridden the prince of the river. In her face, the mother's face, so few years before, the same unmarked, unsaddened smile, the same breathless infinity, so good when you haven't lived the narrow line between standing and sinking. She was glad, now that nothing had happened, that the girl had not heard her, hadn't been touched by experience that wasn't hers, not yet, not yet, don't hurry, tomorrow will wait for you, let all your songs be so innocent the grandmothers smile and the grandfathers get teary-eyed, let me watch you never falter and never fall, I'll carry all the worry for you, you run like a little goat in the spring, I chose to shepherd when I chose you...

On the way back down the trail, she saw a flash of red and green beside her feet, and called the girl back to teach the shape and the name of Wintergreen, to crack the shiny leaf and release its scent, and share the tiny berry with its drop of sweetness, its chalky tang of spice.

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"So is it study or is it art?"

The first is a wick drawn by a practiced hand, straight through wax. Patience dipped again and again to fill out a candle's form, layer on layer for length, strength and stability. There is dedication in study, repeated practice like a mantra, mastery a form of devotion. You give yourself and you give your time, your attention. You receive something human-born, earthy, quiet.  

The second is a flame that consumes wick, wax, and surrounding air! A candle flame dies in a bell jar, and roars into life with tinder and a breath of encouragement. The visual artist might dissolve into the canvas as forms begin to take shape, almost unbidden by the hand and unchained from the palette; an author vanishes into the words of his or her characters as they begin to reveal who they are, how they think, how they will act; a poet, into the filaments of meaning that whisper nuance to nuance, from one word to the next, the curry of one sound hurrying to meet its neighbor; a musician into the vibration that is a life born into and borne by the wind; a dancer to the internal movement that shapes and shakes his or her limbs... When you are empty, the spirit arrives; if you ignore it or try to tame it, the spirit departs. If you study art, and unless you stand in the energy of art itself, your study diminishes it.

Is what "study"? Is what "art"? Why, love of course. The question was: when you meet a new love - and it doesn't have to be lover: simply love, for what it is, for where it leads - when you meet new love, do you approach it as you approach yoga (for example), or do you fall into it like an ocean, like art?

I was speaking with a friend during a stolen afternoon, when neither children nor obligation intruded. The conversation wandered; it was a lazy afternoon, and the thoughts could go where they liked, like goats on a mountainside... :) Thoughts as goats, or vice-versa - I love it. We spoke of yoga and of art and of relationships, they all trotted into one goat-pile, and the bleat that emerged was this: when you find yourself opening to new love, do you meet it like an artist - with disheveled abandon, a bag of fritos for dinner (for example) and a demanding brush eager for the next stroke; or as a student, growing stronger and more convinced with each passage learned, or yoga posture tamed, or question answered?

Her answer was "neither". I wasn't so sure, myself. There is certainly the tendency - historically speaking, I notice it in myself, at least - to hold back, the waters building, the dam cracking, until the artist/author/poet/musician/dancer touches fire and the whole world is obscured in steam. Ok, maybe that's a "guy thing", and our little emotional metaphor to much more tangible biology. In any case, I don't think I am dedicated enough as a student to find that creative impulse in my studies, to bring all that good brain-juice like manna to the meeting, to stay balanced enough... or even to want to stay balanced in the first place...

It's like this: I have travelled so much in my life...


Cosmology of Ones

I will have travelled so much in my life
I'd rather miss that travel when I'm dead
and heaven, I think, is much too far
it's the station at the other end of town
and the time already well past midnight

no, I belong here; I remember too much
a flower opens: the scythe weighs my hand
how she whispered: dust blows on the road
which understood the passage of my heart
the loves I gathered like wind-fall fruit

they were the sweetest, and they were enough
if I have wandered, it was earth to earth.

(São Sepé, Brasil)


I have travelled so much in my life, I am adamantly disinterested in tourism; I am not interested in travel, if it means I bring a bubble of myself along for the ride, as a patient with no immune system wraps themselves in plastic so the world cannot touch their skin... if I wander the streets of a foreign town wrapped in Who I Am and unable to be cracked open... now that is no kind of travel for me. These few years I'm given -- oh my goodness! how few they are! -- I wish to live as the unbelievable adventure it is. So: take me to a new place, but only one where the herd of goat-thoughts are scattered, the ego shattered once again, and all my profane architecture cracks to let some new light in. Allow the merging of whatever is other and whatever is myself to polish another facet of being.

That's what love should be.

Now, in afterthought, I agreed with my friend. I don't think Love with that great capital L is one thing or another, yoga or art. In fact, I would like to turn it all on its head, and make Love king or queen, while the rest of this dance is the kingdom. The Indian mystic Osho said that love shouldn't be restricted to a brief physical act where one body rubs up against another body; rather the energy of Love or Loving is the energy of life itself. You should sit in that Love when you walk down the street, when you make your food, when you work... when you meet another.

So how 'bout this: yoga (study) should be infected by love, like the voices of the novel begin speaking for themselves, the colors of the palette merge to become something new, or the guiter string hums with the same vibrant life that a cell or a star contains; and art (expression) should be infected by love, as the monk whose pure devotion keeps him silent in his cell, as those who hunger to know and to grow lean over their books and lean toward their teachers. Art will live if love lives in it. And Study will thrive if love lives through it.

To get the right answer, sometimes you have to change the question...

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I offered to be part of our community "Solstice Sing"* when it was a small offering among ourselves and local musicians... nice venue to sing a little song, among friends.

Then more folks got wind of it, and suddenly there were top-notch professional performers and singers and sound healers surfing in! It made for a fine event... and left me shy of my often-ragged voice (raggeder than I would like, if I am unable to avoid comparisons). Whenever the rain in my brain got too heavy, I took deep breaths, and got down off my need to achieve, remembering I was just offering what I had to whomever came to hear it. And hey, no one was getting paid for this: easier to find humility when everything is free.

I chose a song I had begun working on a few years back... In the middle of a previous administration, there were so many messages and so many sound-bites blown to the winds: they flew in the windows like sleeping powder, they clouded the eyes like confusion-dust... while the real motivation for the actions of leadership were clearly other than the spoken truths. Painfully other. Sobriety is not about drink, but about becoming human, about allowing there to be shades and colors and complexity in the world. Until you get sober, life is very easy, very black and very white. But when you do get clean... it's very uncomfortable... as soon as someone begins mouthing half-truth, a big blip goes off on your radar, big as a star going nova in an otherwise stark sky. A man says freedom and his other face smirks oil. A man shouts safety and his other face whispers kickbacks. A man cries democracy and his other face... winks. It's awful, like watching a crash in slow motion, watching the fragile bodies crumple. Like watching the twin towers fall, over and over and over again.

~

So the administration changed, and my lyrics were stuck in limbo. They were all about a way of behaving in the world, and we were undergoing some serious behavior mod treatment. New regime, America! Let's focus on coalition and at least a passing attempt at cooperation! One of my stanzas had the enlisted youth "waiting for a leader" who could really lead, and it seemed my request (which was certainly not mine alone) had been answered.

But then... Recently I was watching a kid's movie: it was my daughter's birthday, and while I cooked up dinner for her and her friends, I caught Edward Scissorhands out of the corner of my eye. Quirky, entertaining trifle, and a perfect vehicle for an equally quirky (and nearly unrecognizable) Johnny Depp. The protagonist is an outsider boy, doomed to an outsider's life. And the antagonist, a absolutely unlikable, xenophobic, Other-Bashing high school jock. This other-basher becomes more and more Klannish and abrasive as the movie progresses, finally beating Edward, and then really going off the deep end, trying to shoot him. In the final climactic scene, Edward (who is pacifist to the extreme) saves himself and The Girl by running the Bad Guy through with a scissor. Ok. Hollywood with a Gothic edge.

Here's what troubles me, and what allowed me to complete my lyrics, and perform my song. Inherent in this plot, and in almost every plot of every movie, there is the seed of violence, and the excuse for war. In every movie there is an aggressor whose actions are mildly heinous or terribly heinous... there is Dickens' Uriah Heep sucking life and goodness from the Good, there's a Black Hat, there's a Them and Us... in every case, heinous action is enough that the person or persons deserve to die. We watch them die. We applaud it. To no longer exist: to be removed from existence. Deep in our culture (and many other cultures), we accept without challenge the notion that another being deserves death, and by our own hands.

I have no illusions about response to aggression, and the challenges we face when violence in word or in deed are committed. Most often they begin in word, the noncommittal bark before the bite, excused as nonviolent because "no one was touched", precursor to physical acts. You may be the least inclined to strike out, or one who simmers just below the surface: given continual attacks, or the right combination of exhaustion and insecurity, the "last straw" will create what Thich Nhat Hanh recognizes as the blind action of anger. Disguised as social action or self-defense, thought based in anger or fear is not lucid, and action based on that thought is quite often destructive.

~

Some years ago I stood with a handful of envelopes in front of my Chicago apartment. Just begun my college career. I opened them one by one, a bill, junk mail (when such a thing still existed on paper), coming at last to an official looking letter:

MR MARK SCHULTZ IS REQUIRED TO APPEAR AT HIS LOCAL SELECTIVE SERVICE BUREAU TO REGISTER FOR THE DRAFT.

The draft (or the potential for it) had been reinstated, six short years after the ignominious end of the Viet Nam War. Six years! Was it mass amnesia? Was it any wonder the ranks were depleted, by death, dismemberment, post-traumatic shock syndrome, and the interest in avoiding all of the above? I think it is more selective perception, than amnesia. It is easy to forget what we know, and for whispering voices to put doubt into what we have learned. So we find ourselves, a decade or so later, involved for years in Iraq, in a mess in Afghanistan, pondering North Korea, eyeing Iran. It's awful, like watching a crash in slow motion. Like watching the twin towers fall, over and over and over again.

This year my son is sixteen. Will oil and greed and lack of vision see him digging a foxhole in sand?

~

Your Son Out There

The boys are taking numbers
to stand in line again
born to an open hand
which of them will be men today
and draw a card that wins?

They're looking for a future
looking for their rising star
to shine above the fields
a voice shouts from the doorway
"C'mon in, boy, you're hired."


They say that in my country
when the market's weak there's war
and our coin is thin, my friend
dig a grave for the bravest ones
in endless waves of sand

For those who study nothing
but manufactured fear
choose the path of least return
for the sake of a fantasy
the world can burn and burn.


The boys are drawing papers
to try their luck again
in a game where no one wins
where a number only measures
the days you've left to live

They're looking for a leader
who can see over the wall
"A promised land is there:
if a man can walk on the moon
a car can run on air..."

But the weakest form of freedom
is the one that isn't shared
the hand that's holding nothing
buys nothing without fear.
And there's nothing to fear
nothing to fear
but fear.


But our boys are taking numbers
we've given them to play
on a corner where their future ends
which of them are men today
and draw the card that wins?

They're looking for a leader
looking for a rising star
to shine above the fields
but a voice shouts from the doorway
"C'mon in, son, you're hired."
~

* Visit http://solsticesingforpeace.com - a great idea to share music round the world, launched by a friend of the Odonata Ecovillage: a kind of praise, and a form of prayer.

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I suggested yet again that our death is introduced when we are born, the seed of our departure planted upon our arrival, and perfect darkness as a backdrop for all the colors and sights and sounds of this little, lovely (hopefully at times seen as lovely) life. Can't I just hang that one up for once?

No.

I don't think I was ever one to wade in the shallows; all you need do is raise your eyes once and there it is, the Ocean, and I raised my eyes early. Once you have seen the Ocean, who can look at land the same way, or pretend that only the ankles will get wet, and that there is no danger of drowning?

I don't dwell on my passing, but when I remember it, every fruit tastes sweeter, every kiss is gentler and more passionate, every day more precious, and every anger disarmed. Who rages from their deathbed? What is there left to rage about? And who would you not forgive everything, when you stand with a foot through the door, light radiating through your being, the tiny flicker of your life collected behind you, your attempts, your failings... like everyone's human attempts. Like everyone's humble failings. Like everyone's life. Like everyone's death.

Is that gloomy? Hmm. Well, If you wish to live on a real live planet, where sun is replaced by rain on a regular basis, tide flows in and out following planetary attractions much greater than our wishes, fruit ripens and falls into our palms (if your palm doesn't catch it, it rots)... then I think you need to redefine gloom. If you push the rain away, you live in a desert; say "stop the tide" and the lungs of the world cease to breathe; shun rot, and never again savor a sun-engorged fruit.

I was thinking about the value of a flower yesterday. I had walked round the reservoir, under perfect pre-summer skies, and stopped every fifty paces alongside another late lilac, early blackberry, or heavily-laden wild rose. I put my nose in those petals and drank deep. I have seen silk roses that rivaled the original for beauty; even those with a slight perfume added. Very nice. And the... what? mind? senses? heart?... were not taken in for a moment. There is something so patently artificial (an artifice, a forgery) in these false roses, something so obviously dead, that instead of being drawn toward their petals, I am slightly repelled. In fact - and here is my theory - it is precisely that the living rose came from nothing, from a seed like I came from a seed, blooms a few days in the sun, only to wilt or be torn down with the next heavy rain... the fact that the rose leans toward completion from the moment it sprouts is what gives it delight. If not ephemeral, where is beauty?

The mountains we can watch crumble, if ever so slowly. Or, even as they appear eternal, the stars themselves are burning themselves out. The wheels of the galaxies turn with these sparkling lives toward a time when their engines sputter and collapse. The same sentiment paints nostalgia, fills the eyes with tears at departure, fills the heart with yearning for connection, with joy at a birth... knowing all the time... you have to know, all the time... in a wink the dramas and desires of that small life will have risen up, aged, declined, and left a sweet memory on those who witnessed its passing. The common thread to each pain is that at its heart there was love and there was desire.

So as it is embraced, Death the teacher - she or he - doesn't chill your bones, but makes everything in the world intensely beautiful. That's the lesson. Were you listening to the sadness? The light of the world dims. Or to the love behind the sadness? Ahhh, the light of the world is every color you can imagine.

(1)

I haven't written so many poems. Nor have I penned a single novel, though there is one waiting, and behind that one, who knows?, maybe another. I have been blessed with a few songs. I used to draw well, a lifetime ago. I am responsible for a half-carved Buddha, who patiently waits inside a few inches of wood for some courage and deftness of my hand. I have several recipes I created which really come out well. I was partly responsible for a couple of beautiful kids, who are still beautiful but hardly children anymore. I would say "half-responsible", but in the accounting of my marriage their mother would probably not agree.

I have danced a few times with enough grace that life flowed and left time behind. I have climbed a mountain or two. I dove from 30-foot cliffs in northern Minnesota into 60-foot waters. I have been around the world twice with almost the entire world not noticing (but I noticed -- oh my goodness, have you every flown over Afghanistan and Pakistan and seen the incredible darkness of that wrinkled land?). I've made love enough times when it was really love, that I am happy to have been alive. I am waiting, like the Buddha inside his block, but with decidedly less patience, for a piece of land to build a community, so it is easier to be still, and more fun to cook and play music. I am working for a salary, practicing enough yoga to perhaps be "proficient", writing words that (due to the medium employed) will sooner or later simply vanish in a cloud of dissipating electrons, teeny bees leaving a teeny bee convention, taking random and disconnecting paths, and what I said tonight, yesterday, the day before just go BUZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

What a mess!

Some live a more directed life, at least it seems they do. I tend to persevere in a general direction, but the winds have a tendency to blow me off the previous course onto the Right one. So, no book, no CD, no Buddha, no restaurant, no painting, no flag on Everest... you have to wonder, if you don't throttle life but allow it to whisper to you, whether perhaps you haven't done it quite right?

Well, it could be argued, and in reply I would have to shrug. I guess even the ones I feel got it very darn close to right have had to make the same difficult choices; or biologically or psychologically or politically or geographically had those choices made for them. I see great teachers wonder "How can you choose to have children?", because of the demands involved in raising them. How do you succeed if you stay engaged? How can you give 100% to the world if 85% goes to your family?

Maybe you are not successful, but still you succeed. Maybe what I have accomplished (with so many stumbles that I say it with all humility, knowing my unpolished surfaces too well) in all of this wandering is a deep and still deepening love for the faces and facets and things of this world. Then Cat Stevens was right: "Love is better than a song", even while he lived to sing and life sent music through him. What a mess... but a beautiful, precious, delight-filled one.

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At first it is a passage of days, and you measure them in days from, your eyes and your heart reaching outward, and the familiar - perhaps the mundane - gently is displaced by the roll of the deck, the expanding horizon, the constancy of the wind, the salt on your lips. Run your tongue gently over the upper lip: it is the taste that lingers from a lover's skin, when you have left a kiss, it runs in small rivulets from your forehead to your cheek to the lip, it drips in small dewdrops from the tip of your nose, the mist shrouds everything that was your past, and clouds anything that may be your future, covers it all, covers it all in salt.

There is a beautiful freedom, there. Almost, it wears the simplicity of an ocean monastery, where the monastics curse and grumble, spit and drink, tell stories fit for ports but not for family rooms, smile broadly with gaps where teeth had been, fill great inner emptinesses with huge outer vastnesses, and pray to a god they will not (maybe can not) name. But the god accompanies them nonetheless - it is within every life, well-written or unwritten. It is the balance of a foot upon the deck, the rough leather of the working hands, the sleep which comes deep as 'trench currents when a day's long labor's done. And it is in the view of forever that a man or a woman gets, if they stand in the pulpit looking forward, their feet on an inch of plank, beneath them nothing, above them nothing, before them nothing, but the drone of the engines to carry one beating heart on a gull's flight over water.

How can you consider this hull a freedom? You've got a quarter-acre to walk, foreward and aft, a few levels of deck to explore, round and round. Round and round and round and round and round and round. The same rooms, the same faces, the same tasks, same sunrises and sunsets. The weather changes; but soon it begins to repeat itself. Your beard grows and you cut it back. It grows again. Your teeth are cleaned, again and again (or not). If you are a woman (or not), your legs need shaving (or not). The mundane that you lost is the mundane that finds you, wearing another face; the size of your world becomes as small as the sea around you has become huge.

Freedom is: your one remaining option is to be. I like that, being, for a while.

The arc of an ocean voyage like everything else: spark, fire, flight, smoke, coal, ash, crash, cool, dust. And so delight becomes common, where the heart comes to the test, struggles, and finding no superficial escape, comes to rest.

~

At first it is a passage of days, then weeks away, then months, until away refines its meaning, because there is no more home; away becomes home, becomes a state of being, a simple daily theater played out on an endless, rocking stage. Away, away. Away from what? There is only me. There is only We. A small, salty teardrop on the open sea. Gravity loses its grip when history begins to fade, and what used to pull your heart back with a gentle nostalgic tug pulls no longer. You float. Perfect. Rain falls. The swell rises like hills, then stretches like prairie. You ride the surface of an immeasurable abyss. The stars at night are brighter than anywhere on earth. Sometimes the sky fills with a shower of meteors, all bound for brightness and ash, for somewhere else. There are few fish here: only three elements exist: water, air and a mental mote the watches them.

The crew grows quiet. The passengers are silent; not sullen, but still. In a faded memory, the quality of time determined by the rules of earth, marked by terrestrial shapes and sounds, passed with some deliberation; now it flows and shifts like the waves flow and shift, and could be liquid, might be languid, may hurry you in the direction of the prow with a tail-whip of wind or wave, or may draw you heavily back the way that you came, arms holding you against your future in a way. Your hours are the sound of a train approaching, the sound of its passing, and the declining sound when it has passed, the speed of its call bending your trajectory.

~

The sailor is sighing into his tasks, has become part of wind and wave, a conduit of the incessant regular/irregular rocking of the deck. He is bent over the sheet, or over a mop; she is carrying some load belowdecks, or above; when suddenly -- there is the slight sweet scent of -- ! Sense of smell clothes the most memories. What was it? What is it? I have smelled something like that before... you reach back into a childhood catalogue of faces, places.

Sweet grass, hayfield, spring boughs, rose blossom... It's a wild rose! And in that moment, from asceticism stretched to one edge of the horizon and the other, the sea-monk raises head and hands, looks wildly around -- what grace there is in abandon -- and reaches his breath in the direction of the wind... there is it again! Ahhhhhhhhhhh! How could there be a rose without having run to ground already? The a cry of a gull, then sound of the surf, then houses and walkers with hands held, and pets bounding in and out of the sea; the spire of a town church like an arrow pointing to heaven; the light-specked shade of the village trees; the colors, oh, color again!

And with a few stumbling steps the weight of a man, of a woman, rests in the palm of the land. With a few stumbling steps the heat of the sand... glance around... where is the ship? Where have I been?

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