Dancing on the Point of a Needle

It is Sunday and I'm in a new office in town. Nobody is here. There is a kitchen, a fridge, 4 bathrooms, freshly laid wood floors, supplies neatly stacked in cabinets, a copier/printer/fax/scanner that spits out 40 pages a minute. I just put up my giant pad of post-its so I can suss through where I'm at, my goals, my leavings, my bubbles, my awareness, small things floating on the ocean. Also, I hung a little painting by Michael Wojczuk, who was just in town with his wife, Niko, from Boulder. It is called "The Rabbi's Garden" and was painted in Girona, Catalunya, Spain (north of Barcelona). The walls are a little softer than they were when I arrived. I have rice pasta with pesto in the fridge, and a new container of Antonio's hot salsa for nosh. My right leg is pumping in its customary way, up on the toes, 120 beats a minute, maybe more. My forearms sit comfortably on my new desk, dark grained wood, smooth finish. I'm breathing well, in a way that makes me want to stretch my trunk, hang on a beam and let the ribcage expand. It's been a strange 9 days, some splurges after a six month cleanse, a reintroduction of comfort foods, a reorientation to disorientation, a celebration of spring, my exuberance, my excesses, my capacity to dance on the point of a needle in unbridled joy, not feeling the prick, face oblivious to feet, destruction in every direction, and yet the warm puppy tongue of life force licking me with devotion. I saw it all in 9 days, and I know what to choose, how to play, the changing rhythms, the song variations, the bodily systems that pump, feed, clean, sense, warn, throb, hurt, prickle, and power down with a sip of mate laced with Ume and honey, so that I again sense the earth under my feet. There is work on the table, more coming in, trips, writing to pour through, pour out, like the black mud after a spring snow. There was a red-cheeked joy on Thursday night, at 2am, in a blizzard of a crazed snow, directionless, spinning, spumes of it rising and darting off, Sahara sands of blown texture, a bicycle buried up to the seat, a car lost in the sea of it, and me with my green herringbone sportjacket on, an old yardstick in my hand, no hat, no gloves, searching for spots where I could accurately measure the snowfall and report my rapture to the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque. And I reported 13.5" at 2:12am. It was the best I could do. The drifts around my house were over the yardstick, and the sage was like an island chain of sandbars and trenches, at times thigh deep, at others swept off leaving starfish crystals on coffee clay. I was in and out, but I couldn't get enough. I watched the snow invade the light over the door, a swarm of it in sufi revue, and I had to feel it. So, I'd mount the wall and roll into the powder in the sage, crawl around on hands and knees so that the flakes filled my nostrils. Ahhhhhh, I said, many times repeated, ahhhhhhhhhhh, the kind of ahhhhhh that comes from the center below the bellybutton above the balls, and leaves you breathless, but not in need. And I came back in, finally, and wrote. I was still buzzed from the whiskey and my fingers were wet and numbed on the keys, but I road a flexible flyer of delight that I wish upon every sentient being. My love was full upon me, overflowing, out to you and it, this and that, a soft focus for it inclusive of everybody, and I wrote that it is "the moment I live for." And I wrote, "I love you." And yet I erased that the next day, embarrassed, hung over, my possibilities downsized, my love pocketed, my fears reawakened, my headmaster summoned. But I come to you today pockmarked and preached to, stretched out and bled, hieroglyphics etched on my forehead, an itch in my toes to hike up high, and I feel a pinch of affection for the bars I don't need, Chancy and Gil, and Blake, Joanne and Donna, people I don't see anymore, same old same old, but in that there's some light shining through; underneath the habits is the desire for connection, resurrection, reflection, endlessness, espirit de corps, fathomless, a return home fresh and bountiful (but something you need to put back in the fridge after you shake well and sip plenty), Rip Van Winkle-eyed, win-the-lottery grins, and shy smiled yuks with even the darkest hipsters in the room. It can't last, and it eats everything else in its wake, unsustainable, beat-your-brain-able, your Zen turned neon beer sign, your boat dry-docked until the next tide, your last tickets punched. Nope, can't do it, but you can't blame a man for seeking the headless, heedless joy of dancing on the point of a needle.