Life in a Ditch

Usually this is my favorite time of year and I make a big deal about it.

Honoring the pagan ritual of death and rebirth, I revel in the miracle of rejuvenation ... But this year spring equinox sort of passed me by while I was caught in a vortex of ailing health, dwelling on failed relationships, and generally feeling like a failure for most of the winter. I've managed to keep my head up, in order to do what I have to, but depression can trap you inside yourself, and I have only recently been able to administer my best cure.

Get outside and let Mother Nature remind you how lucky you are to be alive in this moment! Even if you have to do it it in a begrudging and mopey way. Do it! Do it like the Goths on the beach in Portlandia .. Do it your own way, but open yourself up and let Her heal you. With her colors, sounds, and caresses - even her terrible smells and frightening surprises.

This piece is for everyone struggling with life. You're not alone.


Yesterday I was challenged to write more about my life in the present, so I went for a long bike ride up the coast to firmly place my awareness in the here and now, and then write about it. This is what I noticed ~

The traditional heavy winds were blowing against my progress north up the coastal highway. This constant beat down is humbling. I always tell my crew that "headwinds build character", and I use this motto to hunker down and concentrate on my form and cadence. Over and over, I tighten my core, straighten my back, and pace myself along with the hypnotic swish-swish of the crank turning over the chain. Rhythm ... Repetition ... Focus. Predictable patterns that I control, as I make my way up the asphalt ribbon dividing rutted fields of dark green artichokes and blooming strawberries.

A peaceful sense of purpose sets in, and I think of the history of this road. In California, a highway is so revered that we put an honorific "the" in front of it's number. "The One" was the first of it's kind. Linked by a chain of colonizing missions, this road made the state - but today, I'm thinking of the loneliness of it's travelers.

I swerve around a flattened, pregnant raccoon in the middle of my bike path. What was she thinking right before her life was snuffed out by a roaring truck? Did the truck driver even notice he was drifting dangerously off the road? Maybe the raccoon saved his life by waking him up to the sound of her skull being popped out the other side of eighteen wheels.

Onward towards Davenport, I give thanks for my continuing existence. I'm climbing up a long hill, and I'm drawn to the scenery at the side of the highway. I pull over next to a path speckled with constellations of dancing wildflowers. Dark blue spires of lupin pierce clouds of yellow wild mustard, shimmying up a fairytale hillside leading to an old rusty water pump.

"This is my spot!" I recognize, and I haul my bike up a path through the thistles, over to a concrete drainage ditch running parallel to the road. I figure this will give me the wind block I need to smoke my joint.

Pleased with my discovery, I set my pack down, and looking left and right before committing, I spot something that freezes me in a visceral terror. A huge, stretched out snake is coming out from his crack in the ditch to sun himself, and I can't yet see if he's a really well-fed gopher snake or a small rattler because his tail hasn't emerged. Little, blue-bellied lizards scatter as the snake and I size each other up cautiously. He's too cold to move fast, and by the shape of his head I can tell he's just a fat gopher eater. "Good on ya, bud. Get yours. You're no threat, and neither am I, so let's share this space while I smoke. Thank you!"

I light up, and the snake is motionless. I can tell he's alive by the glistening moisture on his skin, and the way he holds his chin slightly up off the ground, sniffing the air. Something in his eyes tells me this crisis is over, and in affirmation, a small female lizard edges back out from the shade, and parks herself next to me on the warm concrete. She's not gonna let some big, doofy human ruin her suntanning hour.

As I smoke, I'm kept company by these creatures. I think about their lives, their daily routines, and their perception of me. How did they conclude I wasn't a threat? Was it because I talked to them out loud, with respect? Or was there some magic conjured up when I asked permission to spend time in their home?

The snake is slowly inching his way across the trough towards the shade of a raspberry patch. When I see him freeze like when I first arrived, I instinctively look up. A red-tailed hawk is circling overhead in long sloping circles that seem to lead ever closer to our little cul-de-sac. I can feel her eyes sweeping across our bodies as if she was the Dark Lord Sauron and I was Frodo with the magic ring in my pocket. Searching, searching ... But, she's riding the wind, and I'm too close to the snake for her to consider striking. Her awareness moves on, the wind carrying her upward and outward, but her presence is still felt; by the snake, by the lizard, and myself. Be aware, she reminds us. We are being watched by death.

I decide that I saved the snake's life by showing up when I did, and I tell him so. The lizard laughs and tells me there are plenty of new bunnies in the fields this time of year that are probably a tastier treat for the hawk, but I'm not convinced.

At this point I realize that I'm carrying on a dialogue with critters, and I'm super-stoned! The snake is unimpressed, and continues his slow progress into the shelter of the raspberry patch. I notice that even after all we've been through together, he's still inspiring fear in me. With his head hidden in the bushes, I can't surmise his intentions. I thought we were friends, but my inherent distrust of snakes makes me believe he may slither back around through the weeds and bite me in the ass. Glancing nervously at the undergrowth behind me, I see several ladybugs making their innocent way up tender chutes of spring grass .. and I relax.

Bidding farewell to my new friends, I ponder how fortuitous this shared moment was. The snake, the lizard, the hawk, and I were all connected, and we changed each other's lives by our interaction. The snake slinks along on his belly, I walk away upright, and soaring above us is the hawk. In the eyes of God there is no difference in our stature. We're all just baby animals, clinging to the side of a rock.

put a bird on it

Crow is bored and causes a ruckus

Hawk is busy serving her purpose

Crow needs crow to pass her dark mutterings on down the line

Hawk's piercing cry resounds in all ears

Crow steals and hordes and jealously guards her treasures against other thieves

Hawk travels light and takes only what she needs

Crow likes rotting flesh

Hawk prefers a fresh catch

Crow only knows what she's heard from other crows

Hawk soars above to see the long road

These are archetypes .. that people live their lives by

How do you choose to fly?

Declaration of Interdependence

We propose to form a New Nation.

Not based on any capture or claim of territory, but a nation declared without boundaries, founded on the sovereign promise and principle of it's people to provide for each other our basic human necessities - free of commerce or coinage - instead with a mutually agreed upon fair exchange.

This is the price and privilege of citizenship.

We hold these fundamental human rights to be:

Sustenance .. Shelter .. Healthcare .. Education .. Love.

As our pool of resources and knowledge to share grows, the shackles of scarcity are removed. As our basic needs are met, the human potential is unlocked for creative problem solving and joy, and the importance of money as a goal and a symbol of success begins to fade away.

The contributions and culture of this new nation will serve as a powerful example to the rest of the world.

In more detail ~

Sustenance (Food and Water)

There is plenty to go around if we are not greedy or unhealthy. Nutrition is a basic human right that can be provided universally with fair trade.

Shelter

House the homeless in exchange for what they can contribute to the community. The same for everyone else.

Healthcare

There won't be a profit motive to making people sick. Healing practitioners and medicine makers will be fairly compensated - but only to the level of providing for their own good health.

Education

When access to all human knowledge is given freely, any problem is collectively solvable. Intellectual freedom and the unleashing of our boundless curiosity is the key to our ultimate survival.

Love

The most fundamental inclusion from where all our power is sourced, and what all of us need the most. Like anywhere - give love without expectation of it being returned and you may lead a good life.

No one can be excluded from our country. As long as they are living, they deserve to be loved.

Are you with us?

#worldsurvival

pushing through concrete

There will always be people who won't return your smile.

Who can't understand, cuz you don't fit their style.

You be you .. like the weed, pushing through concrete.

Beautiful .. cuz he don't know, where he ain't supposed to grow.

How neighborly of me

When I see skallywags - I feel at home

Same when I hear roosters.

As I sift through financial statements

I'm scared of nuclear war

Popping up on my phone

First thing in the morning.

All of my adult life.

-----------

How does this add up?

That I keep turning over leaves

To form new relationships and hope

Only to break them down again

Like so much compost

For a pile

That's already out of control

And looming over my life.

-----------

I listen for clues in the conversations

Of old men sitting around the breakfast table

At McDonalds.

They are talking about Boeing airplanes

That can fit, "maybe four hundred twenty people or more."

Dryly stated, with a singe of contempt

I recognize I've begun to use

When things are too big

Or too new.

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Drinking coffee in the back yard

With the sunshine on my face

It dawns on me

That my neighbor

Whom I only know as "coughing lady"

Is nowhere to be heard

And hasn't been for days.

I hope she's okay.

hearty har har

What use is a heart

When it sits

like a lump of lead

hard and heavy

In your chest?

Radiating bile and bitterness

Out into the world ~

It serves it's purpose

As a warning to the rest of us

To keep it flexible

This most important muscle

Or risk

A lonely death.

Why do we avoid sadness?

The subject of sadness came up last week, specifically from one of our readers - Joy - who had received a complaint about her poetry being 'too sad', and I thought what a great subject for next week's ramble .. I just love the image of a purple haired poet named Joy sprinkling little dollops of sadness everywhere she goes. Like, oops there goes one in my beer and now I'm crying.

But, why do we avoid sadness? Are we afraid of a little depression? What is this obsessive pursuit of happiness in our culture? It's even written into our constitution, and we're addicted to all kinds of substances from pursuing it, and not getting it. Could it be we're all selfish brats, and when we don't get the happiness that we want, we get outraged, and then feel sorry for ourselves.

It's a self-centered baby response, but it's essential to our first moves in life, to our individual identity, separate from the Mother.

Our shock of being born into a cold world makes our reptile mind cry out and get what we need to survive, we get the boob then we're happy. But what if sadness is the emotion that evolved us into human beings and gave us our first pangs of empathy. That's also essential to survival.

To learn a lesson from babies, studies have shown that when a baby cries around other babies, they all start crying as well. You may say that they're imitating, but some babies naturally reach out to the original crying baby and together they get through it. -show picture- awwww...

It's not a selfish or an adult response. An adult responds to crying with annoyance or anger or cooing, and tries to fix the problem. A baby doesn't care about the noise in her ears - she could cry all day - all she knows is that she feels sad too, and somehow that forms a connection that eventually dries up the tears.

So, how do we lose our ability to empathize over time, to naturally reach out to others in pain? Why have we become so fearful and dismissive and contemptuous of tribes that are not our own? One of the reasons, I believe, is that we're systematically trained by society to see others as alien. We're taught over here that there are people in the Middle East out to get us and destroy our way of life, and they are being taught over there that we're attacking them in their homeland. Both are true, but who's purpose does it serve to perpetuate the cycle of violence as a justifiable and defensive response? We call them terrorists, and they call us satanic. It's an eye for eye that keeps the wars going forever.

And maybe that's the whole point. We have been at war forever. When I was an angry teenager in the 80's I felt my government was at war with me and my friends. Reagan was in power and he joked into a live mic on TV about how he was going to 'bomb the Soviet Union back into the Stone Age. The bombing begins in five minutes.'. The entire press corps laughed at it. I knew that the war on drugs was really a war on the inner city, and I knew that the government was letting AIDS fester because they thought gays deserved it. Reagan was always bombing or invading somewhere, and I was convinced that I was going to be drafted to die in the jungle in Nicaragua or a desert in Libya. Hell, they were showing us graphic films of worldwide nuclear annihilation in school (remember 'The Day After), and then telling us that if that were to happen, we were supposed to duck under our desks while the missiles were incoming!

It was in that context, on a beautiful morning, that our teachers dragged us into the common room to watch the space shuttle launch on TV, because there was a teacher on board. When the shuttle exploded, I laughed. I couldn't help it. I didn't care about the loss of life. Here was America getting it's come-uppance. I saw the space shuttle as a symbol of American imperialism and arrogance and to see it blow up was satisfying to my naive sense of justice. I showed a shocking lack of empathy, not only for the people on board, but to the people around me who were upset at watching it live, and undoubtedly they thought of me as a bad person. It was easy for me to do, because I had trained myself to think of people in the government, even innocent astronauts, as the enemy.

Another bright morning years later, had me feeling differently. It was my 32nd birthday - September 11th, 2001, and almost as soon as I was awake - happy to be alive - my neighbor popped in the door and told me to turn on my TV. We were under attack. As I watched those buildings come down, I felt nothing but sadness. Now, maybe I should feel equally sad about all the atrocities all over the world, but when your neighbor's house burns down you feel the heat, and I had lived in New York for almost a decade prior. I had delivered packages to those buildings as a bike messenger. Also, I felt something else. It was a sickening sense of Deja Vu. As I stared at the rolling clouds of dust in the buildings coming down on the screen, it was like one of those backward films where a million puzzle pieces drop on the floor and they all fall perfectly to form the picture. I had been looking at those exact same clouds in a dream I had two weeks before. Every detail and moving shadow was being replayed over and over as I watched in horror.

I often have adventure dreams in an urban setting. My friends and I are generally part of a tribe of loosely affiliated squatters who travel between each other's buildings on secret skywalks and tunnels, and we often get of town to idyllic settings on the shore. It's a nice premise, and we go from there... On this particular dream I was walking into town when I noticed most of the general public had stopped milling around and were all staring up at the sky, transfixed, with their mouths open, like a gaggle of turkeys watching a rain cloud form above them.

The shapes in the clouds were hypnotic. There was slowly revolving faces mouthing silent words and spells, and ancient symbols rippled up and down in swirling, spiral patterns.

I caught myself being drawn in, and I looked around at street level to see what else was going on. There were frogmen in wetsuits gathering on every street corner. They were inflating a fleet of rubber motor boats and getting ready for something big, swiftly cordoning areas off the city. No one else was noticing. They were stuck dead in their tracks - faces up to the cloud - as water started pouring out of the basements of all the buildings and slowly started flooded up the streets.

Seeing that we were being trapped, I rushed out to find my friends and we stole a boat and escaped from the frogmen as they were concentrating on herding everyone into holding pens. Many further adventures ensued in my dream, but I know how boring that gets, and the relevant part of the story is the cloud that everyone was watching was the exact same cloud I was watching on the TV as the World Trade Center came down.

Now I'm not sure I believe in black magic, but when I saw that cloud, I thought "Oh fuck. Here we go". And it's been oh fuck ever since.

Still, I have faith in a different kind of magic. It's an Aikido-style magic that redirects spirits. I know that nothing is permanent. That everything is reversible. And no-one is above redemption.

It's true that can't push a waterfall uphill, but if you channel that energy, and spin it in a different direction, you can create light, and heat. It's hard, but we can still flip the spiral before we go down the tubes.

So, I think about what that dream was trying to tell me - If you want to survive - look around! Don't become hypnotized. And, still on my birthday every year it's 9-11, and I have a mixed emotions. I'm happy and sad, and I think that's good practice. How do I honor something like that, without falling into the sticky dark of negativity? I remember how lucky and happy and gifted I am to be alive. And I try and be grateful for every day, especially on my birthday.


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