Bubble

"Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don't try to figure anything out.
Don't try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest."
~Tilopa

I put my lips to the small, pink-red plastic hoop. Against the rigid, raised-barred teeth, I blow. This is my breath filling the transparency. The bubble breaks the surface tension, unattaches. There is a rainbow shimmer. Each color dashes across the film as the boundaries wobble, as the currents take hold. This is the beauty of randomness. This is the formlessness of soapy intent. This is the delicacy of outcome.

It was late September when the car fell from the bridge. It was the most horrific accident I’d ever seen, that upside-down automobile smashed almost flat from the plunge, still on fire along one of the main thoroughfares into the city of Seattle. Traffic was stalled, and black raincoated policemen ran about the scene, not so much trying to help, for there was no help to be given, but trying to cut a huge swatch away from the impact to shield such a thing from view. I was watching, an insect in an Orange Cab driven by another insect, and together from above we were a dark smudge against the vibration of the event.

What I best remember about that moment, nearly two years ago, is not the color of the car, the weather, or the smell of burning gasoline. What I remember are the hours before and the hours after and the sliding point of change.

My driver and I were mutually nondescript. His mind was turning over the night’s receipts, his wife at home, the mounting and unexplained pileup on the highway, the backroad escape route, morning coffee. My mind was chewing a depression that was always sparked from Columbus business trips, feeling low and empty and directionless, turning in small circles. We hadn’t spoken past the convivial greetings, the where tos, and where froms. I still don’t know his name and I’m sure he doesn’t know mine.

But there, staring together at the accident in the chilled, wet night, all windows rolled down, we were silent and united. No horns sounded around us and no radios played. The idle of engines rumbled together in a deep, resounding, warbled moan. I think he said something like “My God” and I nodded softly and wrapped my arms around my chest.

The traffic cleared and we drove on, but the world of us had changed. We talked at great length about his immigration here and my new marriage, swapped stories of growing up and families, of children and grandfathers and chickens and revolutionaries. I’m sure had we not had our own obligations, we would have spent the evening in some restaurant or coffee shoppe. But as it was, we reached my apartment and conducted our business. Money changed hands and luggage was unloaded.

We leaned against the cab as the rain misted down upon us, looked at each other and promised that we’d each be careful, live good lives, and remember to hold the important things important.

I don’t have to explain this or explicate this further, because everyone at some time in their life has had the same sort of story. And that is it’s meaning. When we see the whole picture, we see the whole picture. And the truth of life’s impermanence, the ever changeable, false-foundational nature of passage from cradle to grave, this truth de-evolves role play and dissipates the thought-shields of our self-defenses. Against it, we are only naked apes.

Inhale, inhale like a pirate with no horizon, and exhale through the wheel even as it is turning. This is you and I.

In a shuttle a few days ago I left the airport, inbound from a business trip to Colorado. My mind was chewing up a depression, sparked into life by all these questions, these fears and these long days of seemingly infinite choice and addiction to safety. As we drove, we crossed over a highway bridge at the same time that a van in another lane drew perilously close to us and kept pace, threatening us onto the shoulder. I glanced down to the road far below us, the short guard rail and the rainy night, and I remembered my cab driver’s face and the slight softness of his voice.

I’ve spent a good amount of time over the last year reading books about writing from Buddhist writers who create mainstream fiction. Early in the process of exploring this collection of uniquely dharmic and literary wisdom, I came upon the phrase, “It doesn’t exist until it is on the page.”

The meaning of that teaching suddenly became clear to me as I thought about the burning highway. Like everything else lately, it’s about impermanence. Nothing exists unless it is on the page. The unwritten novel is intangible and all the scenes those characters might have are just possibility. There is no substance to the future, no concretity of plans and schemes and hopes. The only thing that is real is what you are writing at the moment, and some would say that is questionable as well.

What you are about to write simply doesn’t exist at all, no matter how firmly you attach to it and will it to be, not matter how much time has been spent planning for it and attempting to shove the present moment into it’s mold. The thing that you might one day hold in your hand has no form or substance other than intent. And as powerful as intent can be, as transformative as it can become, there is no way you can show it to anyone, hold it yourself, or put it in the bank. To release this structured future, to excel in the moment of creation rather than in the self-supposed goal of creation is a giddy freedom.

I have lived often in the future, planning for conflicts that never came to pass, formulating dreams that I considered built of iron girders and hard oak beams, constructing movement and project lists and outlines and resisting shifts in motion that led away from my hard-eyed destination. And almost to the one, none of these things came into being. Rather, the spirit of them arrived, but the manner of their arrival varied, or the form they inhabited was not one that I would have imagined… or they simply impacted my presence more like a soap bubble rather than a freight train.

And this really is the difference between passion and attachment that I’ve been trying to describe for months now. One is flow and the other is form. And I think, too, at last, that it is the definition of wind walking. Perhaps it is much more important how you go about things than what those things are, the way you think about them as you pass through them, rather than the passage itself. For me, that was the missing key in both creation and life, to take stock, to detail method, to set schedules, and then to throw it all away.

And so I do, throw it all away, all that I have learned in the last year about my creative roadblocks and my process. For it was crucial and meaningless. What I was doing all along was absolutely what I should have been doing. How I was thinking about it as I was doing it was simply wrong.

My burning desire is my breath, but after breathing, it is not mine to determine direction, shape, or resiliency. Though my hopes and dreams are as strong and as real as they ever were, it’s only my job to keep breathing. The wonder of life is what happens next.

Full circle, round back to where it all began.

I inhale and press my lips against the ring. And everything else comes now from that exhalation.

Japanese Noodles and the Ragged Tiger

I think the hardest thing about being and living alone are the small currents, tiny schools of fish through the psyche, pockets of temperature change, dappled light and dark. There in the koi ponds they wriggle tails and shift patterns of heads and bodies. When the mood hits, it hits and sticks. It lingers like scotch tape on the bottom of a cat’s paw. Pick at it and shake it with teeth and claws or capsize onto your back and wait out the eventual weakening of the glue. Walk around for a bit and it might just come off, but it might not.

Flick, tail, flicker, orange and red blur, sunlight on yellow and shadows around distended bubble eyes and whiskers probing nothing.

I’ve spent the greater part of the last decade not only alone, but usually alone in some foreign city, working where I sleep and where I eat. As soon as the tide shifts away from this state of being, it retracts quickly, returns itself to an equilibrium that depends almost solely on self-motivation and self-steerage.

I’m in the time now after the slapback, when all of the work to understand the return has been done and all the movement required to stand in the old footprints has been made. And even though I returned this time to a place far from the place I stood in the past, it is still a city in the same realm of being. There are still long days here in the middle of the Seattle winter, long days now filled completely with self-project management. Work doesn’t exist unless I make it exist. Creation is not encountered or begun unless I choose to encounter it or begin it. Moods linger in whatever state they were last to be found, until I can determine ways to alter them, or until some small moment, unnoticed before, does it for me.

This is a slow science. It’s a forever question. There are sectors of my life to pass through, one after the other. There are work tables and small creatures and scents and colors and promises. But they are also sectional; those rooms have doors. So easy it is now to simply shut them, to walk down a long hallway and lay on the grass outside.

On days like this, it’s an easy thing to not do. If I don’t force the issue, schedule out music and writing and web work and reading and whatnot, nothing will happen, because I’m the only one around to enact motion. And it’s an interesting thing to stand in the middle of the nothing and ask yourself firmly, what is the natural state. Is this indeed the place I was meant to go to and learn from, or the place I return to because I have not gone to and learned from someplace else? Are the shoulds of my life, the plans and the goals indicative of what it is that I want to do with my life, or are they a convenient way of structuring the passing of time, living up to some imagined fulfillment, or providing some validity as to the expenditure of precious minutes, hours and years as insurance against old age regret?

I remember when I was a teenager, I loved Duran Duran. But I loved them secretly. In those days, in the setting of Junior High or High School, allegiance to Simon Le Bon and the rest of the Fab Five would be grounds for an immediate pummeling if not an immediate shunning. Albeit, I was too big to be pummeled and I was pretty well shunned as it was. But there is always room for new and interesting brands of persecution when it comes to teenage boys.

My girlfriends loved Duran Duran, as all girlfriends did back then. And through them, I had a limitless treasure trove of albums and merchandise, which I, gollum-like, knelt over and admired when everything was quiet and dark. Rio. Seven and the Ragged Tiger. Arena on VHS. These were my secret passions and I devoured them hungrily, sucked down the poppy guitar and whining vocals, feasted on the ambiguous sexuality, and turned lyrics over and over and over in my hands until they were torn and senseless.

I remember a time in the long queue for a roller coaster with a group of several couples when the background ride music switched to the dance mix version of The Reflex. The strain it took to stop my legs from moving and to purse my lips tightly so as not to mouth the words gave me a headache the rest of the day.

“Ch’yeah… Duran Duran. This sucks,” my friend said.

“Mmmmm hmmmmm,” I nodded, cross legged and teeth clenched.

Such pleasure later when I raced home, holed up in the dark basement and danced to Is There Something I Should Know. Release. And as it turns out, this was probably good practice, or bad practice as the case may be, for my later teenage experiences with women.

Flip, head swish, murky waves ripple, stones settle, shadow fish.

The point is that I can do anything I want to do with my life at this moment, perhaps more so than at any moment in the past. And that gives me much more control than I know what to do with. It gives me more hours in the day than I know what to do with. And it gives me a solitude that while very familiar and safe, does not attract the kind of magickal surprises one gets from a much different, community-based setting.

I’ve begun to develop a new way of going about my life, something I am calling “Noodling”. It has to do with freedom from anything but motion, and no sectional destinations, only sketching and tinkering and messing about with margins. And I’m seriously thinking about taking Walkabout on the road, driving up the coast of Canada to Alaska, seeking something in the journey that will give me some answers.

Both of these things are a direct result of a raging self-argument. Both of them are an attempt to walk closer and closer to the glee of a secret Duran Duran and farther and father away from self-discipline and structure and obligation and expectation. Because at this point, with the chaos of my brain as it attempts to exact control and the fire of my passion as it attempts to be heard, it’s turning out that the only solution is going to be taking the heart path and being true to living rather than true to life.

But today, less of me stares at the koi pond from above and more of me floats on the surface on a thin leaf boat, buffeted by fat rubbery lips gasping for insect legs, blinded by the patterns that wash over the moodscape like tsunamis. And more of me leans against walls and stares out windows, plays multiple games of Scrabble, talks to the moon, and watches the grey, grey heavens level the cresting waves, until sleep comes again and the glue waters down to nothing.

Rain and the Goddess

At 3:30 in the morning, there was only the Rain and the Goddess. I listened to both, one falling in torrents in the absolute silence and darkness, one speaking into my ear, “Shhhh, it’s okay…” I could have stayed awake until the dawn broke the night or until the rain stopped, but I didn’t want to see either light or absence. And so, I entered the bath. I hid away. One candle flickered and some nag champa, the heat, the caress of bodiless warmth.

There on my futon, or there in the water, or there in-between, there was nothing. I had no thoughts, no cares, no sound. I was in no place, had no time, breathed no breaths. And she surrounded me and fell about me in a hush of slow serenity, in an appeasement, a cooling of tongue fire, a calming of hurricane.

Tonight is very much like that, a slowness, a shuffle, a hazy ring around the moon, a cold, quiet thing. And in the morning, the last day of winter, the last feast of the crone. The maiden arises and the child runs through the melting fields. Tomorrow, she is with him. Tonight, we talk alone one last time.

Yes, girl, I call the moon mother too. You and I, one skin. For she is freezing white upon the ice lake, rising in steam, daring your lips to part. She is an overripe melon, juicy and succulent in the heat of midsummer. She is sliver thin, a waif wandering. She is darkest black, turns her back to enter the women’s hut and warns you not to follow, for strong is the monthly magic of moon and river.

Tonight, she wears a hoop skirt full of color and she dances the snake dance on the dry, brittle grasses. She glows with motion. She shimmers, old grandmother. Her bones, white bones, ache and yet she bends her knees low, she keens a last song for the dead ones and begins to flake her skin.

I realize just how much of a tornado are my thoughts, my mind, just how chaotic and busy, buzzing and churning, taking in and putting out. It’s moments like these three, early morning rain, the womb of porcelain and candlelight, the winter hush, that I hear myself think. It’s moments like these when She appears, the Goddess of my memory, the Goddess of secrets, the Goddess of “Shhhhhhh, love… Shhhhh”. Sometimes we watch the mother moon together. Usually, she comes and leaves within a few heartbeats. A touch, enough for belief to alight, two words and maybe a rustle of fur, maybe a flutter of feathers, maybe a fox mask… always leaving something changed behind.

Like you, it’s time for me to find the wolf that’s waiting. Too long have I let the storm of my mind rage like a wild crow trapped in a basement. This, too, is who I am, big pawed and big footed, teeth made for biting, shackles and blue eyes. This is who I am, running and hunting, rolling on my haunches, silence in the tree line, naked in the underbrush, watching steel-sensed.

I have chosen a way of wandering, not just once, but many times over. I have chosen a place that is no place and a continual redefinition, a continuum of inward and outward, of strong and stronger self-statement and self-creation. I am exactly as I am through all the choices I have ever made. So, instead of fighting against it, instead of seeking something different, instead of thinking back on what could have been, instead of looking forward on what might have been… no, not this time. I should just wake up, look around, and be it fully and with every last howl in my belly. If this is who I am to be, I’ll be it with all I am. And that is all she has ever wanted of me.

Mother, grandmother, sings and shakes her rattle, bows her head low, twists her skirts around. There is no sound in the night other than the rustling of dry tree limbs.

One last sighing, sweet-lipped kiss before the dawn.