Storms and Roses

First the storms, then the blooms. I'm just out of a weeklong Zen meditation and writing retreat. It's part of an "intensive" that lasts for the full year. These were taken during the week either at/near my house on the high Mesa or on the Devisadero trail in the hills behind Taos. It has been rainy and cool since mid May often with stormy skies and fat, cold drops of rain. The rivers are running high and although the seemingly abundant snowpack melted off quickly (due, we're told, to a high dust content caused by the windstorms of early spring which settled in the snow and absorbed the heat of the sun, liquifying the snow), the above normal rains have made up for it. Apparently, the Rio Grande, which supplies water to Arizona and Texas under water rights transfer deals entered into in the 70s and 80s (boo), does not have to be curtailed (through opening and closing dams) this year to supply the full allotment. This is good news for irrigators/farmers along the Rio Grande and its tributaries (and acequias) in southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico who will also get a full allotment. Since I've lived in the Taos Valley, we have had at least normal or above normal moisture (following 5 years of extrem drought), which feels sweet. Normal for this high desert ringed by 13,000' peaks, is 12 inches. Some years we've had close to 15". The Taos Ski Valley receives about 300" of snow in a normal year (with approximately 60-70" where I live at 7,091'). In contrast, New York City averages 42" of rain per year, South Florida around 65", Seattle approximately 40" (less than NYC, yes, but it drizzles more there), parts of the Oregon and Washington (and California) coasts, approximately 70". Somehow, it all works.

And can you believe the vivacity of these cactus flowers?! Crazy.

From Fight to Flight

I'm ready to fight today. I'm a confused wolverine baring my teeth. I speak calmly, but I'm tired, not a sleep deprived tired, a mutant's tired, the exhaustion from having left myself and returned to a desolate, foreign, too bright place. And the mutant wants out. Me mutant hears false provocations and cannot make camp. He is impatient and hopeless; he is worried that there is nothing, no reason, no purpose, just random emotions. And yet my mutant's ego is strong; it obliterates everything but the light of morning. If I can write this, I think, there is still some light at the bottom of the barrel and the mutation can be dissolved (transmuted?). I am sitting and I am writing. I am expanding in the face of popping balloons. I have been crowded out for a while, pushed to the edge of the bed. And even as I write this, I am still close to the edge, my heart beats too fast, my belly clenches enough to weaken my legs, and my ego is dug in, defiant, making love to the mutant. It refuses definition or the notion that practice, consistent practice, is good for me. It bristles at its machinations being called addiction. It says it's all a big conspiracy theory. It defends its turf. It says I can drink and trip and snort cocaine in the quest for experience. Who could deny that who is not a loser, a wussy, a prude, a killjoy? It carves out spaces for me and even, I think, it is looking out for me, being a matchmaker, keeping me from being the lean loner on the desert. It's also spending all my money and losing my possessions. And who is the one who is hopeless? Who is the one thinking it's too late, it's no use? Who is the one worried about dying? Is that the ego, too? Is that part of the trap? I hear myself saying "don't you want magic? Don't you want to be able to dive through your navel into nothingness?" You're addicted to ecstasy (not the drug) and you don't know it. You'd trade a 7 year process of transformation for a 3-day concert filled with ionized air and one dance with the dark skinned girl in the short denim skirt with the green eyes lit by the setting sun and your seduction - the dance where you lose yourself, that crystal-clinking tingling in your groin rising up your heated abdomen and reaching your eyes where you now know she knows and although you probably won't say anything or do anything, you know you could, in that place that feels like the high mountains above treeline and smells like pine sap and sulfur and lands you in a painting with her on the mossy edge of a dark lake under a soaring granite ledge, your warmth all in your skin, the touching and clinging and clawed ass grabbing; it's a dream, the same dream it's always been. And she's there with you (you think, but does it matter?), this person you see at the three-day concert, between angled red rocks, 100 yards above the stage at the birthing of this gap, with the band in a runaway trance of twisting base and waving guitar, drumbeats picking out individual ribs, surrounded by 10,000 bobbing heads with open mouths, and, closer, by old friends and concert buddies swaying through their own fields of understanding, looking like family, reaching out for you both when they think you're lost, knowing it, too, and not judging but still pulling you back from the high mountain lake where you'll always make love, to make sure you don't because that girl's boyfriend is coming back from the beer stand. And as you come back, before you smile at each other like Adam and Eve, before the clank of the sound comes back as if someone opened the hatch of an airplane, you swim with her in that lake and you know you've known something larger, something you might remember on your deathbed. And then the boyfriend's there; he's new to the scene and he gives you his beer to sip. He's tripping, too, gleamy and amazed, a joyous stretch of flesh and bone, a jumping bean of kindness, and although the music is now loud and your ears have popped and you feel your bare feet sticking to the beer soaked blue tarp, you are in love, not with the girl, or the boyfriend, but with the organism, the whole undulating mass of people, the bats above against the indigo sky, the holy red hulks of rock pointing west, the blue lit city of Denver like Oz 30 miles northeast, and your round-eyed friends passing you a bag of Molly grabbing the meat of your shoulder, slapping your palms - you have made it here, you have made it, you are part of the organism and it loves itself into one piece, and you are nothing but the current that runs through it. Do you understand that place? Is it worth the week it takes to settle back into your body and function in time? Tell me.

6 Days

The past 6 days have been spent with friends, nearby, far away, some new, some old family, some grounding and being grounded. Kid energy, emergent, smooth, an inhabiting of self beginning to occur. There was a pinch of worry and a dollop of woe, a cleaving of the center, a heaving before the ocean went warm and glassy, a snorting from the top before the belly rounded. Some vanity before that storm faded east and left a scrubbed knowing like the desert becoming itself again after the wind. The field of possibility extended in good food, abundance rubbing off on me in loaves of bread, sun-dried tomato paste, an Italian accent full of bounce and circles, stinging grappa and lemon tart, a clean floor and emptied sink, the closed-eyed laughter of a sexy elf watching irises nod in a hail storm. There was a long hike in the rain down in the bottom of the gorge where the river overflowed into the hot spring pools, but not with menace, and not enough to deter two magic tadpoles with freckled legs who talk to faeries and nature divas and remember the river as a bubbling brother. Paintings of mallet-breasted women mixed with the spring and stir of basketball and the popeyed swirl of good whiskey. In the looking back, there is a whole circle. Mixed, mixed, mate and some coffee, deep, bitter greens and plum extract, lean red meat topped with silky mozzarella and long fried onions flecked with torn basil leaves, grilled zuchini and cob corn popping on your canines, slow swallows of quiet water at room temperature then a margarita soothed with a woven basket full of fresh limes. To bed before 11pm after a day of swimming and pine nut tea, the eyes of the children, green and indigo streaked with dusk sky and old tears, dotted around the irises with the points of sundials. 6 days is a long journey, to the peak of Chomolungma and the jungles of Laos, from my Lost China Sea filled with collapsing waves, to the cool, grassy valley of late spring where my masks are off, my clothing optional, my journey ended, again, where it always begins.

Time and Timelessness

A raven said to me, "Don't forget this hiking is your meditation. Some people need to move to be still." Then he asked me, "What anchors you to time?" And I thought, "Shame brings me back to time; to guilt; to will in a degrading attempt to prevent dissipation." To create requires timelessness. To love requires space, a suspension of self-awareness. I am now tired, sleepy, but I know these things. The fear of wasting time, by definition, disappears in the open field. Without time, there is no measure, no comparison. It is never too late. You can throw your arms around the people you miss, you can ask why and what and listen. The veil lifts, the barrier melts, the pathology becomes meaningless. You can write with your wrinkles and sound like youth because there is no measure. Presence is the sound of youth to us who are anchored in time, when really it is the naked sound, unembellished, unselfconscious, unaware of anything but the muscularity and breeze of it. Those words like walking in the mountains, watching moist dust settle among desert volcanoes, seeing the mossy underbelly of the foothills in a silver-plated light thrown from somewhere behind a sprawling thunderhead. There is no time in that view, the bounce of feet on the rocks, the stray drops grazing a cheek. And then a bolt of lightning over Two Peaks sparks the thought, "maybe if I get hit it'll knock me out of time forever and my eyes will blaze with an indescribable fire." And then the next thought, "But will it hurt?"

Ordinary Man

I'm in my cave like office, cool while the sun beats down through the leafing trees outside. Spring has come with layers of fragrance, lilacs and apple trees, dogwoods and astors, cherry trees and weeping willows in full blossom. Where there were scars in the peeling back of the snow in February and March, there is now cushy, dewy, color-mad life. It draws me out, the perfume, the skin caressing warmth, the thickening grasses. Yesterday, on Devisadero, the shoulders of the mountains gave blue-green healing to my computer-scattered eyes. An endless Moroccan blue sky, no clouds for a hundred miles in every direction, that green against blue like food, enabling deep breaths and nourishment. I expected people up there, but they must have hidden or I may have disappeared from view, vaporizing into the rocks I used as springs, miniaturizing into the insect on the dancing astors, their central yellow suns roundbellied. There in the shadows of khaki rocks the new flowers waved out of moss. Scrub oaks started to unfurl their little leaves, rubbery like any newborn, warm to the touch. Up on the ridge, the leaves were slower, still balled, waiting for a mild night. But the wildflowers were ready, waving, jumping, jiggling, so happy to be in the world that they'd give it all now, not worry about the future. I did pass one human, and she was a flower, too, a wide-jawed blond lady in reverie, off to the side of the trail in prayer, stretching her body skyward, making a giant circle of life with her arms, looking like I do on my altar rock. I was singing to myself, a song about an ordinary man, and I lowered my voice, but I did not stop as she was ok with it, two people in prayer, on a mountain, looking at the blue, listening to the birds. And the ravens played, rascally, riding backward in the wind, beaks facing west, gliding east, cigars in their mouths. They made me laugh and they knew it. I wondered about the fiddler, wondered if she wondered about me. I saw a fiddler weeks ago, snow still melting off the rocks, a woman I'd met before, but not the fiddler in green. She may be my teacher. The fiddler I'd followed and seen out on the trail and near the river is not my teacher, though I have things to learn. She is a lover and to know her I'll need to know how to play. The song I was singing yesterday had no fiddle. It was voice and guitar. My voice felt supple and rangy. It's a sad song, a reflective longing, a cautionary tale. "Just the son of an ordinary man/living his life in a gentle rage/living day by day by day/this is who he was meant to be/like taking water from a grain of sand/seeking sin in a pious age/wanting more but can't find a way/to disregard his destiny." It's 4:09 and I may have to leave the cave again. I have levitating to do. There are dinner parties and margaritas, women in sheer spring dresses dancing to ragtag blues looking for a shoulder to lean on. It is the time of the big wakeup. It is a hard time to stay on the trail, but that's where the magic is.

A Call to Pushups - The Battle

I'm running hard, running like a clueless bull. I didn't think I'd be back here again, but here I am. It's 7:30 and I'm doing pushups every couple of minutes to drain the excess energy. I'm hungry although I just ate. I want to go to town and watch sports while sipping beers and then go outside and marvel at the mild night. I want to go to parties, insert myself into scenes. I want to drink coffee and pace, pump my legs up and down, scratch some shit into notebooks, phrases, words, things I should be doing. It's all pushing the dream away. Where is the late night cafe (one thing we're surely missing in Taos)? Where are friends to talk in circles with (they're out there, but I'm gunshy, wanting solitude as much companionship, a strange, tearing dilemma). Why did I not know about the vision quests at the Lama Foundation this past weekend? Why does everything feel so difficult? Why have a drifted from my writing intensive commitments? My teacher? This is the turning point. How do I keep or regain the discipline in spring and summer? How? How do I not berate myself and turn myself into an enemy? Who are or where are my companions in sweet discipline? I know it can be sweet. I've tasted it. 5 or 6 weeks of straying from the core and my nerves are playing the old jangled song. I'm capable of great expressions of exuberance, of profligate wastes of time and money and life force. That's what I need to remember. The commitment of life force to the need, the addiction, the capitalist/consumptive cells. They don't need that much, but they have fallen back upon asking. I am not going to give it. And yet I do not want to be a dictator to my soul. No. No. There is a middle road. Pushups, situps, running, climbing, biking...and then I can sit, and write and read (160 pages since mid yesterday...so not too bad). Yes, tucked back in, everything expanding, taking artistic chances, opening wide to people. That's what I know. That's exciting and calming. I'm getting those calls again from the vampires. They disappeared because I disappeared. But you reappear and your blood still tastes sweet. This isn't easy. This is confusing. I don't want this to be epic. I'm dramatic, but, man, if you could look at me pacing my house, dropping down to do pushups, opening and closing cabinets, circling, checking the computer, picking pennies off the floor, unloading the car. I have more energy than 10 men, and more exhaustion, too. I want to get off wanting. I look forward to again being sated, open, alert, understanding, empathetic, gleam-eyed, and slow. It won't take long. It's just underneath this buzzing. But the buzzing is hard to tune out. This has helped. I don't know if I'll publish it. It's rambling. It's jibberish and gobbledegook. It's real, though. I'm in a challenge. I want to be able to do whatever I want and at the same time I want discipline and ease of heart. When those things match, which they did there for a while during sweet winter, I am in the open field. Time disappears. Now becomes enough.

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest III: The Law of Least Effort

"Your walk isn't the same as it was in the winter."

I hadn't seen Harris in a few weeks. I'd been traveling and biking, doing other things. He was sitting on the rock throne at the top of Devisadero.

"Whaddya mean?"

He paused for a minute, looking at the ground then up at me.

"You know."

"Dude, you act like you know me. I've seen you a few times on this trail and you live in a cave. You don't know me. I don't have to deal with this. I'm on a hike. I'm on my own. I don't know you; you don't know me."

Truth is I was glad to see him. No more than 10 minutes earlier I was craving human connection; thinking I was becoming too much of a loner. I could feel it in my stomach, no different than a deep hunger for food, but without the gurgling. I was also hungry for food. In fact, I was all hunger, seeking, needing and feeling sad at the emptiness, an abandonment. But I hadn't been abandoned and I'd eaten plenty.

Harris stayed quiet and neutral, letting my little storm pass.

"You're an athlete now, not a traveler."

"What?"

"You're powering up the mountain like you're in a race."

"I'm no faster than I was in February."

"It's not about your relative speed, it's about the lean of your body and where your eyes are. You're not seeing as much."

"And you saw this in my last 10 strides as I approached you here?"

"No, me and Great Wing have watched you coming up the front side the last couple of times. He knows you know he was showing off last week when he made the big circle around you using his wings as ailerons to hold steady in that gale. No wing flaps at all, right?"

"Yeah, I remember. Pretty amazing. He came within 4 or 5 feet of me and I could hear the wind against his wings."

"You may not know it, but you have a few friends up here. Great Wing happens to think you're alright. He's noticed that you're walking like you did the winter before last, all swinging arms, stomp-footed and mouth breathing. I wasn't here, but he told me."

"He told you. Cmon, Harris. I believe in a lot of things, but how can a bird tell you something."

"Keep coming here and raise your head up and you'll probably figure it out."

Like all my conversations with Harris, I half wanted to smack the guy and at the same time I knew what he was telling me was true and I knew I needed to hear it. It was always like a dream up there when he showed up. It didn't make sense. He didn't make sense...but he did.

"He did come really close to me that day and I thought I heard something, not a voice, but something that had meaning in it."

"The ravens on this mountain have a lot of ways to communicate."

"Seems like it."

Harris nodded and for the first time I noticed he had a green backpack on.

"That pack new?," I asked.

"A guy left it up here last week."

"And you took it? What if he comes back looking for it?"

"Then it'll be there for him exactly where he thinks it will be."

"Like my sunglasses?"

He smiled with his eyes cast down."

"I have to go find Mutton. I'll see you again."

I had no idea who or what Mutton was, but in the couple of times I'd run into Harris the encounters ended this way each time with the phrase "I'll see you again." Not "I'll see you soon" or "I'll see you around" but "I'll see you again." There was a certainty in it and there wasn't anything to say back so I nodded and knew it to be true.

On the way back down, I stopped to hug my brother tree. I stood in the soft dark dirt and leaned my third eye into the skinny branch that sticks out. With my arms around his trunk, I asked my brother for guidance. He made no sounds this day, no creaks or groans. But before I pulled back a memory floated up. I was in my car driving from Boulder to Taos a few years ago and Deepak Chopra played on the CD player. He was talking about the law of least effort. And then I saw the vision of Great Wing hovering in the wind, letting it take him, not moving his wings but for a subtle side-to-side adjustment, and then after floating above me for a minute, letting the wind propel him into a great arc out over the cliffs. He rode the wind. And it hit me that the phrase I thought of that day with Great Wing over me was "law of least effort."

I let go of brother tree and jangled down the trail, a little hungry still, but nothing that couldn't keep.