Struggle to Find Hope

a Spiral Dance essay

I slept well, but woke up early. Perhaps, as a result, or perhaps not, I am feeling rather cynical this morning. Remember that cynics are actually disappointed idealists.

I am disappointed in you, humanity. I am disappointed in so many of you individually, as well. You could do so much better, and yet you so often flinch away from the effort, settling instead into your little living hells, comfortable because they are familiar. Comfortable with suffering because enlightenment is just too much work.

I am not going to go into a rant that even I will find predictable, against the usual suspects, hatred, fear, murder, pain, suffering, doubt. I won't go into that rant because it won't make any difference. No one listens to such rants anymore, because the horrors have become normalized, and even those who would agree with you are eager to scroll on as quickly as possible.

I am not a believer in either the defeatist "biology is destiny" camp or the pseudo-Darwinian "humanity is inherently violent" camp; yet on days when I wake up feeling cynical, I can't really generate a coherent argument against the social and political consequences of entropy. But that's why I am disappointed in you, humanity, and you, people who choose to embrace entropy rather than defy it. You give in way too easily.

You disappoint me, humanity, because of your constant cowardly reluctance to look the abyss in the eye, and spit at it. Fuck nihilism. Nihilism is just another ideology, just another -ism, that looks at only part of the picture and thinks it's the whole. I cannot name a single -ism that does not make that mistake. You disappoint me, humanity, with your constant tendency to look at only one part of the elephant and think it's the whole elephant.

You disappoint me, humanity, because you constantly think too small, too provincial, and in the end too narcissistically. You are still primates, humanity, in that you embody the preconscious tension between group/mob psychology and the necessary urge to evolve, and all too often default back towards your personal comfort zone and simplistic easy answers to life's challenges.

You disappoint me, humanity, because you so often miss the whole point of what it means to be human: Biology isn't destiny, although it's the starting gate. We are given the gift of consciousness, which allows us to override and rewrite our biological programming. We are not locked into anything, we merely believe that we are. The elephant is much bigger than we think it is. Our potential is precisely as large as our imagination. We have the power to shape reality, and we usually fail to do so because we choose to be so small. Biology and biography are not destiny because we can overcome them. We can change our destiny because we believe we can. To do so, we have to defy the downward slide that is entropy, and walk uphill. Suffering is easier than enlightenment, because suffering slides downhill, while enlightenment means claiming the mountain in the worst weather, when you're already tired.

The mark of suffering that most individuals who work for and towards the light bear is sheer, constant exhaustion. It's an uphill battle, necessary and worthwhile and rewarding, yet the hardest work you will ever do. (Until you reach that point where you let go; then it becomes the easiest.) It can kill you. It can make you cynical. I am tired all the time, humanity, and it's directly caused by the majority of you refusing to take up your share of the load of the work that needs doing to make the world a finer place. I understand the anger of some social activists; it comes from exhaustion, frustration, and those days when it feels like no one actually wants to grow up.

Cynics are frustrated as well as disappointed idealists. We all have our days when it's too hard, there's too much to do, and the news reports how once again we have failed to grow up as a species.

Warfare has been continuous for more than a century now, because it's been made too easy. The technological advances since the Industrial Revolution have brought many benefits and changes to our modern world, but it has also made it easier to kill people in large numbers. Before the Industrial Revolution, war was always limited in scope; it is no longer. Terrorism is a word for warfare on a social scale, a different kind of battlefield. Extremists who use terror are always smaller in number than armies; but they are feared because their commitment is total, fanatical, nihilistic. Fuck nihilism again. The proper response to terror is to laugh at it, just as the proper response to the abyss of fear is to give it the finger, in fierce and laughing defiance. Fuck terrorism. You can't live in fear.

There are words I struggle with, when I am feeling disappointed in you, humanity, but the struggle is when it matters most:

Hope. Love. Faith.

Those are words that it is very easy to misuse, and when misused they turn toxic, deadly, violent to the spirit, even more than wounds to the flesh. So I always use them with vast caution. No one knows better than a bard or a wizard how easily the power of words can turn dark. Use them with caution.

Cynicism and disappointment are only fatal if you let them be. If you stop exploring the rest of the elephant, and give up, and stay in your cave. I am very disappointed in you this morning, humanity, but I haven't given up on you. You really need to grow up, and quickly. Take your hands off the stove, children, before they scar over and you can no longer feel the rest of the elephant. I'm not going to tell you what's on the other side of the door, you won't hear it, you won't listen. You disappoint in that, too, humanity. Children. But I will tell that there is a door, and the keys to open it are words that have to be used in the right tone, not with irony, despair, or the other faces of entropy. Entropy is going to tell you that have already failed. Don't listen. The keys to the door are those words, used in the right way, used in the proper frame of mind. Words which, when you get past cynicism and disappointment, even if it takes a lot of effort and all day, open up into the balm against disappointment, and the solution to terrorism:

Hope. Love. Faith.

Well, then, humanity. What the fuck are you waiting for?

Who Are We, and Where Are We Going

a Spiral Dance essay

It's pathetic, I suppose, that I'm now more comfortable in anonymous hotel rooms than anywhere I'm supposed to be living, I have a place to live in Madison, now, with a very positive and even supportive roommate, but sometimes I still prefer being alone. That's really why I stopped at a hotel last night. Too tired to deal with people. No spoons left for social graces. Too much effort to even talk to people I like and want to be with. I just wanted to be alone and silent. I don't know how to survive without silence and solitude, anymore. Happiest out there driving alone on the road, in the desert, or forest, or wherever there aren't many people, or any.

I've been kicked out of every group I've ever belonged to. It keeps happening. I should accept it by now, but I keep fighting it. Every group I've ever given my loyalty to, I've been forced to leave behind. I keep getting kicked out of the nest, before I'm ready to leave on my own. Either I've outgrown them, or the gods want me to move on, or it's time and I don't want to go, or fate moves the pieces on my board and I have to leave.

It keeps happening. It's happening again.

Madison, WI, isn't supposed to be where I live. During the crushing end of times in Beloit, when I was having to see everything I own, including my home, the only home I've ever owned, I dreamed that I could give Madison a chance. After all, I used to live there, and had and have many friends, and musician partners, and so on. I've given it a good try, but everything, literally everything, has told me not to make a hime there. No signs of inevitable placement. I've been prevented at every turn. That's the usual sign.

I went through the hell of trying to rent an apartment in Madison, only to be confronted by the unsolvable Catch-22 of: 1. You can't rent an apartment unless you have a job, or credit, or income source. 2. You can't get a job unless you have a street address of a place to live, like an apartment. That paradox is what me onto the road in early November, where I spent almost two months out West; two months, I must say, that were almost the only happy times I had in all of 2015. Everyone noticed. Everyone commented on it. I was happier out West than I had been all year. Less stressed. More positive.

Then I came back to Wisconsin. And the stress immediately got worse again. And then I got bullied, and had to flee a situation where I had been staying. And that pushed me back out on the road again. If only for more healing via travel.

Then I came back.

I'm exhausted, right now, because after two weeks on the road, to Ann Arbor then down to Tennessee and Kentucky to check out another possible living situation, which did not pan out, I had to immediately go back to Ann Arbor for a job interview. I sucked at the interview, and I don't think I'll get the job, but the more I thought about it the more clear it was: I am being invited to live anywhere except Madison. It's time to go.

I got really clear, driving back towards Madison, although stopping short at a hotel before getting there, that Wisconsin is hell for me now and I just need to leave it behind. I got really, really clear; it's so obvious that I should have seen it before, that all my remaining time spent in Madison will be about preparing to leave. It's true, there are details to finish up of this life. I won't rush, if the gods permit, and I know I won't be staying much longer. A few months, probably.

Wisconsin has been very hard on me for the past decade, and it's never going to emotionally neutral there. All that suffering will always leave an aura of sour apples behind. Maybe not in the greenwood per se, but everywhere there are people. So it's time to go. I have more Stuff to get rid of, from the storage locker, and I have time to say goodbye properly to some long term friends, but then I will be gone. These past few months were offered to me, in the words of a friend, as a Farewell Tour. And that's how I am treating them. I won't say de ice what kind of Farewell, just yet. It doesn't have to be that final one, although for awhile that too was in the cards. But it's definitely a Farewell to the life that used to be, that I have now outgrown, and need to put behind me, so I can actually live and thrive, elsewhere. That's the truth of this. That's also why hotels feel better than what used to be "home."

I've never been able to "go home again" in my life. (Cue Thomas Wolfe.) I've never really been able to go back, and stay, anywhere I used to live. I've always been required to live in a new place. I know that on some level that the gods park me in a new place, to be of service there, so that my frequency of light can be used to brighten up a dark place. I'm really tired of always being alone, of never finding a loving partner, although I accept this as part of my path. You're getting a lot more honesty from me, tonight, in this hotel, than anyone is probably prepare to deal with. Well, deal with it. This life path I am on is nomadic, is lonely, is demanding, and has its powerful rewards that sometimes make it all feel like it's been worth it, although not that often.

And I have to keep going.

Caroline Myss, one of my spiritual directors this lifetime, says: Loyalty is a beautiful tribal quality, especially when it is conscious loyalty, a commitment that serves the individual as well as the group. Extremes of loyalty that harm one's ability to protect oneself, however, qualify as a belief pattern from which one needs to free oneself.

That nails it on the head. When I first give my loyalty to a group, I am very conscious of it, and very aware that service is the key: serving others, we serve ourselves. Yet I tend to give my loyalty a bit too fiercely, and it does come back to bite me. Because I make the mistake of thinking that others also give their loyalty as I do. That's one reason I've been kicked out of the nest so many times. People change, and I find myself alone in where I gave my loyalty, with no reciprocation anymore.

I don't really want to die, anymore. I'm not really suicidal. But I do still have days when I just don't care, when I'm too tired to care, and don't want to go on. Lots of honesty, here. Days I can't face anything normal or socially typical. When I'd rather be out there talking to the Green Man God of the Woods than any human. When Dionysus has my love, and you don't. Days I just can't deal with the superficiality, the inanity, the shallow self-regard. Days when I could cheerfully be a hermit in the desert, and talk to the coyotes more than people. I'm half wild as it is, I guess I always was. Maybe that's why I keep getting kicked out of every nest I've ever tried to build. It's happening again, right now. Let me just pull the knife out of my back, before I continue. There. That's better.

The last year has been about getting rid of or being forced to let go of everything I owened, everything left to me by my parents, all my money, my condo, my belongings, my whole life here. Another nest just taken away. Apparently I'm just a drama queen for ever mentioning it, or for it affecting my mood, or for being so exhausted that I'm not perky or cheerful enough, for it giving me a "bad attitude." I guess that's true. Never mind that it's been the most horrific decade of my entire life, beginning with the deaths of my parents more or less in my arms, passing through almost dying from chronic illness, and finally culminating in the Year I Lost Everything.

Well, so what.

Time to move on. Time to start over somewhere else. Time to go back out to the desert, or the woods, and start over elsewhere, with a lot less baggage, including the physical. Since that seems to be the pattern of my life, I might as well embrace it. I don't know if I will ever live with people anymore, I'll just drop in for a visit. A good visit. With some people, a very good visit. But love and sex? Probably never going to be a permanent thing, for me. Always moving on. I can accept that, too. It doesn't hurt too much, tonight, to embrace that. After all, being pansexual or an omnisexual mystic means I've had sex with the sky and the mountains as often or more than sex with people, men or women or both.

I like people. I really do. I just can't build permanent love relationships with them. I mean, other than as family of choice, which I do love and am grateful for. I just seem to be the wanderer, the warrior, doomed to be homeless, rootless, and so on. That's not self pity talking, that's just acknowledging the archetypes that rule a life.

So, here I go, again. Writing this out in a hotel in the middle of the night after collapsing into sleep upon arrival. That's why you get so much honesty, at the moment, no point in lying to myself. No need to pretend anything other than what it is. And we go on.

A Thousand Words About Endings

(A Spiral Dance essay.)

Not for the first time in my life, nor even the third, an important relationship in my life ended because the other person had an idea about me that was wrong, or thought I had done something that in fact I had not actually done. This has happened more than once, and in quiet moments of self-reflection, I wonder. It's been on my mind today, sadness and bitter regret and anger and hurt and contemplation and acceptance all mixed together.

More than a misunderstanding, the event itself, that has been said to happen, can be a matter of perspective and interpretation, and sometimes viewpoints are so relative that they seem to exist in different universes. But people get very attached to the narratives that they create for their lives, especially those in which they become locked into being in the right, so that you must be wrong, and so justification and rationalization come into play. Most people have egos that need to be fed, and are not capable of suffering much contradiction. So your viewpoint might not even get a hearing, or might get dismissed, and if you insist on creating a dialogue, which takes two or isn't real, sometimes you get rebuffed. Nowhere.

So what did I contribute to the situation? It's a reasonable question. Yet when the other party accuses you of something you know you didn't do, and won't listen, it's a question impossible to answer. I've considered it often, and with no feint towards justification I can honestly say I don't know. Both parties feel wronged, but only one wishes to work it out.

For my part, I know well that I live my life at a level of intensity and passion that some people simply don't like, and don't want to engage. So maybe the other felt provoked. Yet sometimes the rationale for a break-up is dishonest in that an excuse is found rather than the truth being told. People look for an excuse to conceal their real, even unconscious, intentions. Sometimes people think that's the best thing to do, or the least likely to cause suffering, which itself can be another layer of delusion or self-deception.

For my part, I always prefer telling the truth. It's easier, it's simpler, and you don't have to waste time trying to remember which lie you told to which person. But not everyone feels that way. Most lies we tell are self-supporting justifications, or rationalizations that appear to make sensible our most irrational urges and compulsions. Learning to live more consciously means first of all that you have to stop lying to yourself.

And that can be the hardest work you've ever done on your own self. I know for a fact that on at least one occasion, probably two, the person pushed me away, or rather found a reason to break up with me, because my presence was requiring them to stop lying to themselves about something in the core of their being. I made them uncomfortable. Not deliberately, not because I wanted to, but because of my insistence on honesty, and my refusal to go along with the lies they were telling themselves. Lots of people do not like very much honesty.

But in a relationship that's what I have to give. Honesty. I do not do codependency, and the reason I do not do it is because it's always built on lies we tell ourselves, like the idea that we don't deserve anything better. People often reject honesty when it doesn't serve their self-aggrandizing interests. Our illusions can seem more comfortable or pleasing to us. We are all guilty of that, me too, once or twice in our lives. But codependent people live within an even deeper tangle of delusions and despairs. They often believe that love is supposed to hurt, so they work subconsciously to make it painful even when it doesn't need to be.

Which is why I find it so fascinating that this pattern of being rejected for something I never said or did keeps happening, in my life, that people shove me out of their lives because they have decided to believe something about me that isn't true. Of course, you don't always get a chance to tell your side of a conflict.

I must consider if this is a flaw in myself, of which I am not conscious. That's why I mentioned intensity and passion. It has been pointed out to me by a few friends that my personality can, without my knowledge or intention, dominate a room. I've been told I can change the mood of a room just by walking into it. I have learned to be much more aware of that, since it's not something I want to do, usually. I hold myself back. I rarely let show the full force of my personality. I've gotten used to being invisible.

Maybe I just keep choosing complicated, damaged people to love. Maybe the reason I end up alone is because I am in their lives for the period of time it takes them to grow up, and then we're done, and we grow apart. Maybe I should just open a finishing school.

But there is another possibility, if you examine life from an archetypal, symbolic level, a level of oversight that floats above the everyday and can look down upon events with dispassion and honesty, that the relationship was already done, and it was time for me to move on. It wouldn't be the first time I was severed from some situation and person that made me feel comfortable and accepted, but like an eagle fledgling needs to be pushed out of the nest so that it could learn to fly, I needed to be pushed out of my comfort zone.

So maybe when the job is done, some higher purpose forces me to move on. You are of service, and you must go on to the next job. Maybe this functions on the archetypal level of sacred contracts. Maybe that's my purpose, here, my job. An unarticulated and secret function, as healer and shaman. Not all healings are obvious, and you don't always get to know the outcome.

At this point I do not expect to ever have a permanent, long term love relationship. It doesn't seem to be my fate. If I'm honest with myself, it's not the way I'm wired. I will probably always be alone, which has its own challenges. I don't seem to be wired for monogamy, anyway, nor shall I be permitted its pleasures. Who cares? I've survived thus far, and who knows what the future might bring.

All I know for certain is that here is a pattern. Patterns always mean something. You have to pay attention whenever you discover a pattern, or there is no chance of altering it. No doubt these musings will mean nothing to anyone but me. So be it.

You Must Honor Illness

(a Spiral Dance essay)

I've felt pulled off-balance for so long, off-center and not-grounded, and for good reason. I had been ill for twenty years, although it hadn't been diagnosed as what it was till near the end of that time. Then the cure had its own pulls off center, a genuine cure but it comes with its own set of problems, changes and re-creations of what was and what can never be again. I still don't know what the new normal is. If there is one. If there will ever be again a sense of stability and direction.

I spend all this long day waiting, a day where nothing bad happened but I just couldn't get rid of that sense of darkness and void lurking just behind everything you see. Out of the corner of the eye the fabric is ripped away and the play is revealed for what it is, a painted backdrop over nothing. If you turn your head too quickly, the paper rips and you see through the world into that emptiness behind all manifest things.

And that's why I often feel off-balance and fogged out and ungrounded lately. It's just that I don't have any maps any more. All the old maps are useless or incomplete. When you've drifted this far out to sea, there's no sense of which direction to go to find land again. It's water heaving all around, and no smell of shore.

So in the past few days, after a summer's long pull down towards the smiling void, I find myself turning, or returning, to those sources that have given me a sense of center before, a center from which to extend. And so this morning I read, out of nothing that could remotely be called a coincidence, words that linger with me all this long day. Words that come back to me as I fail to find my center and extent once again this late night:

You must honor illness. It gives us time for reflection. As hard as it is, it helps us sort out our priorities. I know there's nothing worse then someone telling you, 'This illness of yours is a gift.' No, it's painful and discouraging. It's not a gift, but it is a time to pull back and take a closer look at one's life.

—Father Sergei, quoted in Mary Swander's luminous book The Desert Pilgrim: En route to mysticism and miracles.

I have tried hard, many times, to honor my illness, and my recovery. Illness has not been a gift. It's been a passage that more or less removed any chance of meeting whatever ambition I had felt years ago for purpose in this life. This doesn't mean there was no direction, but such maps as there were were never more than puzzle codexes in a lost language leading you away from treasure island. Illness sent me adrift and astray. The beneficial knowledge that comes from hindsight about this illness is knowing that in fact my failures in life, so labeled when they occurred, were not a failure of will, not a personality defect, nor a lack of focus. The life-force truly had been sucked out of my blood, blood which tastes like a lost ancestral ocean. I was neither too lazy nor unambitious, I was in truth waylaid by gravitational tides fully veiled until this recent complicated cure.

Still the recovery has been a time of reflection. My priorities, after almost dying, were reshuffled into a new configuration. I know what my purpose here is now, and I know upon reflection what I'm for, what I do best: I am a maker, a bard, an artist, who's really not very good at much else. Self-knowledge is not all roses and lilies, though, as I have discovered I lack any patience for idiocy that would further leech my essence. I know my mortality from the inside out, having almost lost my ability to live. I have a lot to do, and don't want to waste any more time doing it.

So that's the necessary distinction: My illness was no gift, yet it did provide me other gifts. Of self-awareness, of self-confidence in knowing what I'm good at and what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm still recovering. Not what was lost, but what I never had but dreamed. A dream wherein a map guides me no land that ever was, but an island come into being as one discovers it. There's nothing on the other side of those mountains till you cross their range and see what's there, the act of vision itself what solidifies void into form, light into mass. That effortless conversion of energy into matter.

That Box of Rocks

A Spiral Dance essay

This morning it's all I can do to wake up after a heavy sleep. A sleep induced by chemical agency I'd rather avoid, but at least it was a refreshing sleep. And a hard process waking up. I'm never a quick awakener anymore, and even slower now. At some point, maybe a cup of tea and a good book later, maybe after a half-hour of hands-on meditation and healing, there's a switch that gets thrown in the back on the mind and suddenly I'm alert, aware, able to parse the day's needs. Till then, I am a slow evolving, a fish who just climbed out onto land for the first time, gasping, trying to learn to breathe. Till the spark inhabits the mind, I am a slow ember, a dark waving of treebranches in shadow, pointing towards the river hidden beyond. A walk to the river is no walk at all. It barely stirs the rushes. I am inarticulate. The neighbors wave and want to chat, and it's all I can do to wave back, smile, and keep strolling. Conversation this early in my day is a calamity. I never want to be social till I'm fully awake, fully aware. Even then, some days being social is a drain. As lonely and isolated as I feel some days, morning silence is never unfriendly. Ask me again in an hour, and I'm sure I'll be a cheerful companion. Till then, ignore my silence. Or better yet, leave it alone, and take your need for chatter with the waitress off to the diner, and leave me in peace.

I am immersed right now in writing words and music. It keeps me alive. Its demands keep me going. All else is not much fun, and if I let myself think about requirements and obligations demanded of me by the outside world, I get cranky and irritable. The disordered illogic of bureaucratic systems is enraging. It's not even a matter of putting up with necessity. It's that you're aware of how fragile and arbitrary it all is. It could all fall apart at any moment. Life itself is irrepressible. Those who decry the end of life are usually referring to their own way of life, not yours.

People, even people who should know better, try to sell you on the idea that if you had a better tool for making art, your art would improve. (Of course they're happy to sell you a better tool, to their profit.) It's not about the tools. Good tools do help make great art, it's true. But a great musician would make great music no matter which tools were available. A great musician could sit down, and be handed a box of rocks, and make music out of that. What makes a great musician, or artist, is the attitude of working with whatever is at hand: Let's see what we can make from this. Great artists I've known have an open-ended sense of wonder and exploration, very child-like in many ways, that allows them to see what's actually there, rather than what most people think is there. They do not pre-judge, they observe; and they have an experimental approach to both work and life. Life is a work of art, making art is a way of life; they're not separate, and both are experiments, trial and error till something good happens. Meanwhile, you learn as much as you can about what you're doing, about how you're living. Making art is an ecological practice: art, environment, life, all are intertwined.

Most people never can see past their own projections: what they think is there. They catalog and dismiss. They move on quickly to the next row, to catalog and dismiss that, too. They believe that a sense of accomplishment lies in how much, how quickly, one is able to catalog and dismiss. But wizards, and bards, and artists, see what's really there. They know that there's no end to learning, and many thing are so vast that in the end they will remain mysterious and unknown, even given a lifetime of study. They see what others do not see mostly because others are not looking. I've said this all before. The only people who listened were those who already understood the truth of it. My fellow wizards, bards, and artists.

Most people see only what they want to see, believe what they want to believe. There is a vast distance separating them from what is really there, and they cling to that gap with all their might. Most people believe that if they recite a cant a hundred times, it becomes true. They believe that about political policy, and they believe that about healing affirmations: if you say it's true, enough times, with enough force, it becomes true.

But the world is resistant. It has its own momentum. You can't turn a turnip into a forest by sheer force of will. Your will imposed on the world is your first, childish mistake. Unlike the musician who, presented with a box of rocks, makes some music from them, your stance is refuse to use the rocks, because they're impractical and unsuitable. The basic definition of ego is fear of change, because all change begins in the self. The ego clings to its own image of its changeless self, and is a master of denial. Don't pay attention to the facts, here's what's really true, says the ego. Political display is ego-display; that's not a new insight. National identity is bound up with ego and its fears of change. Confrontation with the Other is terrifying to most, because on some level they know it will require change. They reject the box of rocks because they're not homeland rocks, and they're not the right flag-borne color anyway.

Politics without artists, without naturalists with thirty years of field experience sitting by the river and observing its ecosystem, is hollow politics. It's incestuous and self-serving. More than forty years ago Rachel Carson disturbed the universe by writing her book Silent Spring, and taking to task what we were doing to the environment. She was roundly attacked by the vested political and chemical-company interests, but she was proved right. Her book led directly to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Look who is trying to dismantle that agency now, forty years after it was founded: the vested chemical-company interests, and the politicians they bought. For the sake of expediency and profit they want to go back to poisoning the natural world. The natural world, they want us to forget or ignore, is also the world we live in. For our own self-interest, we can't afford to shit where we sleep. We will pollute ourselves in our own wastes, unto death. This is not news. This is not a new insight. Why then must it be repeated as if it were news?

Because politics without a sense of the sacred is hollow and self-serving. Without a sense of social justice, in which social justice is part of the fabric of the ecosystem, there is no real justice. Without a sense of human equality with all other creatures we share the planet with, we get a sense of entitled superiority that sees nothing wrong with destroying the very systems that keep it alive, all in name of short-term goals. Politics with no long view is murderous and suicidal.

The world resists being controlled. If you think you're the master of the world, you're deluded. If you think you're even the master of your own small corner of the world, you've never understood true mastery. True mastery is husbandry. It's cajoling the world to be more like what it aspires to be, to evolve, to be better than it is, to find efficient solutions to its patterns. Wizards are ecologists at root, because all you're really doing is helping the world be what it most wants to be. Life is irrepressible, and wants to grow. Nobody wants to die, as inevitable as that might be. Everything wants to reach its full flowering, reaches its fulfillment, finds its purpose and meaning. Nothing makes the box of rocks happier than for a great musician to make music with it, or for a child to fantasize a castle wall and moat made from it. That wall wants to hold together, not fall. When you help it stay upright, and fulfill its purpose, you've made the world into its better self. All you do is help. Life is meant to be about service.

Life is meant to be about service, not about self-fulfillment. Actually, those are not contradictory, because few things are more fulfilling than a life of dedicated service. What you are in service to, well, that's where you have to figure out your own purpose in life. For myself, it's finally clear, after decades of distraction and being waylaid by people telling me what I should be doing, that my own life is meant to be in service of the art, music, and poetry that I make. Decades were spent trying to fit into the ideas and patterns and plans that others told me my life should be about. Now I now they were all wrong. Burn those old maps, they'll just lead you astray.

I have lost all my maps, again. I've had significant practice in losing my maps before. I've been through the dark night of the senses, then the dark night of the soul, when all the maps, and all contact with God, are taken away from you. In that outer darkness, echoing back, all you can hear are your own fearful limits. I have lost my mental maps more than once, this lifetime. Now, after the surgery, after the recovery, still recovering, beginning to prepare about moving forward towards the completion of the medical narrative of recovery, with new maps imposed on me about where I am expected to arrive so that the restoration of my life through another surgery and recovery can be made complete, I find myself angrily rejecting those maps again. I am exhausted with other peoples' ideas of where I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to do, who I'm supposed to become. I am being presented with constantly-changing narratives of expectations, told that I have to arrive on that shore by my own will and and under my power, told when I ask for help and a crew to man my boat that it isn't available. That I'm on my own, again, with no one to either count on or to help me arrive without blame.

If I've learned anything, it's that every time you survive something life-threatening, you have to redraw the maps. Or make new ones. I've learned, several times, so that it seems like it was all practice for what I'm dealing with right now, right here, that I have to constantly remake my own maps. And just as constantly be willing to let older maps blow off the bowsprit, into the wind. Parchment leaves in the wind, falling into the sea. I find myself once again mapless and uncertain of the territory. Everything is made new, and I don't know the lay of the land anymore. You bet that strikes a nerve. It also strikes a chord, ringing out of the very air: a celestial music, a ring of voices of angels, which, after all, sound a lot like the music you can make out of a box of rocks.

Angel, speak to me. You forbidding and blaring foghorn, you long night of nothing in the wind but cedar chatter, you long road of suffering and rebirth, you constant immolation and dying, you desert silence, speak to me. Speak to me of the ghats in Varanasi where the bodies of holy ancestors are burned, given to the wind. Speak to me of the dessicated ribs of Joshua Trees in the desert, which slipstream the wind around themselves. Speak to me of the quiet brown river curving under overhanging trees, wind riffling its surface under unsteady light and uncertain clouds. Speak to me, angel, of my own death and rebirth: not for the first time, either, but just the latest in a long series of unmapped reincarnations. I've died and come to life again, angel. This morning, my mind finally clear enough to be able to face the day, is just one more evolution of consciousness, reborn out of sleep into waking life. I find some kind of quiet exultation in the wind in the cedars, the annoyed bluejay shrieking from the pear tree's summit. Life will go on. Life will find a way.

Even when I die and am reborn again, which is inevitable, unavoidable, and neither to be feared nor unwelcomed, I see, with the bard's eye behind my own everyday gaze, that this is just part of the spiral pattern that is my greatest work of art so far, my life. Angel, I've finally learned that I'd settle for starvation and homelessness as long as I can make music, make art, make photographs. Nothing else matters as much, I don[t need much else. I've finally learned that it's more important than anything else I've ever done, to just give in and make art. It doesn't even matter how it gets received, or used. My life of service is to be in service to that which prompts me to make art. My life of service is to be in service to art. I'm a slow learner, it only took me my entire life, and this latest death and rebirth, to at last sort out my priorities and stop giving a damn what anyone else thinks about it. That was a tough one, angel. I've always had a hard time ignoring the outer shell of advice. Well-meant or not, it was useless all along. I see that now. I am at last seeing what's really there: that the most wonderful thing I can do with my life is burn myself up in the actinic blue fire of Creation, to spend all my life on living art and making life, and bring as much of the Creation into view as I can, which is the purpose of making art: to praise and reveal the Creation. All a poet can do is praise. That's all the purpose there is.

Since I died, and was reborn, I've started another new way of art, one that I've been meaning to investigate for a long time. But now, there's no time like the present, nearly dying has re-sorted my priorities, and there's point in waiting to do something you've always wanted to do, and are in fact meant to do. After my parents died, I took up teaching myself to draw with colored pencils: a very conscious choice of learning a completely new art medium, for the first time free of any need for, or possibility of, parental approval or rejection. For the first time, I was doing art that nobody could catalog and dismiss, that those family-born voices could no longer say was unworthy. It didn't even matter if I ever got good at drawing with colored pencils; that wasn't the point. Nor was it necessary to be like every other colored-pencil artist, and create photo-realistic drawings such as they teach you in the how-to books. I have no interest in being like everyone else; I'll skip the perfectionism this time around, thank you. And so, now, I've done it again: started another new artistic process that is brand new to me, that reveals a world never seen before, and reveals it in ways both imaginative and spiritual. Namely, I finally allowed myself to get into infrared photography. Now, with digital cameras, it's technically more approachable and easier than back in the film camera days; I was stopped back then by the difficulties of technical mastery. Now, in the past few weeks, with a new infrared photography system for my existing camera, I've found myself looking at the world anew, all over again with new eyes, as if for the first time, revealed in the first light of the first day of Creation.

And that's essential. With the loss of the old maps, I have to make new maps. Finally, I know that my new maps always have to be crayon drawings, finger-paintings, child-like renderings of the terrain as a bard, an artists, or a musician using sonar echo-location, would see it. My new maps, angel, must always be seen from the ground, not from the air. And they have to be paintings, not technical drawings. Great painters have always taught us to see the world in a new way, in new light. Great photographers have revealed the world as never seen by the unaided eye. Great musicians have opened our ears. Charles Ives once demanded of an audience for one of his difficult, dissonant new compositions: "Stand up and use your ears like a man!" That's great advice, angel with the voice of a foghorn or a bluejay. As long as there is surprise and discovery in this new life, this life whose purpose is at last known to be about nothing but making art, and like a wizard-poet, a wizard-artist, revealing the world the way it wants to be revealed, for its own purpose and joy, as long as there is joy and making, then I will have lived well. Any new maps I must remake will be good ones, even if as usual only temporary. I can always make more.

This morning, after a sunny dawn, thin gray clouds have covered the sky. But it's not an oncoming storm. It's the edge of possibility. Map it out, get it down. Finish your tea. Go make some art, sufficient to the day.

Resurrection

a Spiral Dance essay

A woodpecker taps in my fruit tree behind the porch, as I sit quietly in the morning. Loud geese fly over at the same moment.

Easter morning. Have I come back to life? “He is risen, indeed.” That’s how I feel. I feel like this is my personal Easter, not a traditional religious one. I went to bed at midnight, and woke early today. Last night I set large candles burning outside the front door, like a stone door’s path into darkness and back into light. I make little rituals intuitively, not always knowing what I’m doing, even later. Last night was a candlelit night throughout the house. The two candles marking the path to my door marked a return of spirit: the trail to the entrance: the way back home, and into the kingdom of heaven. This all sounds so inflated and pretentious, but I feel very humble before the act itself. Words can betray us because they make something visceral into a mere abstraction of itself: the sign that stands in for the thing is not itself the thing. I haven’t listened to any music yet today, yet what I hear in my head is Fauré’s Requiem, which ends with a sublime “In Paradisum.” In Paradise we return home to ourselves, to our oneness with the divine.

A part of the day is waiting. Waiting till I need to leave home to go do what I’m supposed to do. Waiting to come back to life. In the meantime, we sit and contemplate our lives. I can feel the eros moving in me, like a tide of energy that reaches to the ends of each limb; but I feel no need to express it sexually in any usual way today; I am not drawn to physical sex, this morning, even as I feel the tingle of eros everywhere. This is neither denial nor transcendence of sexuality: I neither repress nor exalt. It’s the expression of pansexuality.

Watching a red-headed woodpecker tap his head against the fruit tree’s mid-level branches this morning was an erotic experience, as was hearing the Canadian geese flying north immediately above my roof-beam. Drinking hot sweet tea as I nibbled at fresh warm cinnamon toast dripping with melted butter was an erotic experience. Chickadees bounce in the spruce branches, filled with the quick fire of living. The robins have been around for awhile, but now I am hearing the territorial call of a redwing blackbird, which for me is the true sign of spring’s return. The world is coming back to life, and under every feather and flower bud pulses a white glow and spark of life-force like a river of sunlight fire running across the nerves and veins of the created world. The surfaces of things are the illusion; the fire within is what’s real. Matter is only slow energy—everything is in vibration, even what we consider to be dead.

It is easy to be drawn into simple adoration of the life-force today, the contemplation of the everyday ecstatic awareness. I spend many days with these feelings running through; they become an ordinary experience of the extraordinary. Mostly you must keep silent about it: let it play out, throughout the day, without drawing special attention to it. Nothing dissipates ecstasy like overly-dramatized awe. Sometimes it’s a relief to step into one’s head, and just be notionally rational for awhile. Yet when this awareness of the eros is upon you, it is an affirmation of life, of the return to life, after days spent in the valley of the shadow of death.

The truth of illusion, of maya, of the illusion of existence, is that what we take to be real isn’t, and what we have been taught to dismiss is what’s far more real and solid than we are ourselves. What we take to be real is but a dream, while what we assume to be Dreamtime is more real than anything we can trip over in waking life. Some mornings you see all the sparks flowing, the tracks and patterns of the white light that is the constituent force of being, the inner-visual representation of the vibratory force of living. We know now from the new physics that everything we believe to be solid and material is made of living light: matter is energy, and energy forms into matter. The world is made of light, which strobes in and out of existence nine billion times a second.

I sit comfortably nude on my porch, feeling the sunlight on my thighs, and the soft fabric of the chair against my backside. The wind is christening the tree branches with early pollen. A squirrel jumps up and down on a spruce branch making a small cloud of fog from loosened dust.

Sexuality is a celebration of the life-force, of the eros. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants. Humans expressing sexual union are flowering, and orgasm is the explosion of blooms that emerge from the soil and muck of our lives. We are the healthy roses that grow from the shit and blood.

There is a known and well-practiced sensuality of going through the day naked, physically if not emotionally. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Journals of the necessity to wear fine fabrics against the skin, to be sensual and embodied, to live in chambers draped with fine colors and textures, to eat and drink fine foods and beverages; in short, to stimulate the senses so that the mind too is full, sensually alive and aware. I do my morning chores without bothering to get dressed, I sit and write in the morning before dressing. I feel very much alive, although not at the moment explicitly, actively sexual. There is sometimes no need to express sexually the erotics of everyday life. If we focus too much on the orgasm we can miss how the rest of existence is equally orgiastic. Three male robins are chasing each other through my trees, games of territory and dominance, loudly chirping the whole time.

Anoint the body with fine oils and lotions, as depicted in the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. How ironic the paradox of body-hating anti-sensualist clerics whose own scared texts are themselves so sensual; perhaps this paradox can help explain another paradox, that of clerical sexual misconduct. Any good depth psychologist will remind you that what you repress here will emerge over there, twice as strong, often distorted and laced with shadows. The origins of the oppression of others must logically lie in repression of the self: telling others how to behave is but a reflection of one’s deep inner knowledge of one’s own inner misbehavior. What we judge in others is what we hate most in ourselves. What we hide from ourselves won’t leave us alone.

The morning has been clear and sunny, yet now braided clouds are moving in. The winds chase them into whorls of gray ink. The clouds are layered, thick with strange shapes and patterns. A storm could arise at any time.

Too easily we divert eros in orgasm, we go for the payoff and forget to enjoy the journey. I am a very sensual person, a very sex-positive person, and I judge no-one for what they do when they make love. The only sin I can perceive in sexuality is coercion without consent: forcing one’s ego-will upon another person without their agreement. Making love increases the eros, the life-force, it brings more light into the Universe, and if only for a moment slows down the inevitable heat-death at the end of time. Entropy is our great myth of modern times, replacing the doctrines that no longer give us stories we can embrace or believe in. Making love is anentropic. Coercion is entropic. Sin is entropic: it brings about the great death that much sooner. Hatred and unforgiveness are entropic, contradictions of the life-force itself: those who claim to be fighting against the Adversary often do the Adversary’s work when they become humorless and ideologically fixed. The Adversary’s game-plan is to convince you he does not exist; that death and despair are the reality of existence, and that there is no love. But the Adversary’s failing is that in its pride it cannot love: it runs away from the eros, the life-force, it cannot abide genuine love. When you make love, when you anoint the beloved, as in the Songs of Songs, the Divine is what is present. The eros brings us back to life, and closer to life. Entropy is what tries to convince us life isn’t worth living.

Despair is a theology of material rationality without spiritual content. Dry and deadly dull academic literature is a theology of grammar: but all the artistic craft in the world is useless if you have no subject, if you have nothing to say. Subject-subject consciousness, as defined by Harry Hay, and developed by a couple of generations of Radical Faeries in his wake, makes the Other into the Self: we are One. “The spear in my brother’s heart is the spear in my own heart.” If we are all subjects, all one, there can be no separation between us. We may celebrate diversity as many manifestations of the One. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” The masks of god are endless and endlessly strange. Anoint the body of your beloved, as you are anointed yourself by the Beloved. “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.” So said Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic.

The 20th century mystic, Thomas Merton, who came into his full flowering after encountering the Zen of Meister Eckhart, and the Zen of Zen, wrote, “It is not true that the saints and the great contemplatives never loved created things, and had no understanding or appreciation of the world, with its sights and sounds and the people living in it. They loved everything and everyone.” A Tungus shaman sang a chant, recorded by a 19th century anthropologist, the repeated refrain of which was, “Everything that is, is alive.” It’s a horrible, tragic mistake to denigrate created things, ti divide and dismiss them from spirit. It is human hubris to imagine that anything created by a loving God could be less than perfect, and less than loved. Spirit that moves in all things, the living spirit, is the same as that living electricity that we can see flowing in the world today, that living fire, the light of creation, the light that is Creation. What is material is not other than spiritual: just as matter and energy are known to be one by the physicists, spirit and flesh are known to be one by the mystics and saints.

Despair is an aspect of hubris, an extreme aspect of self-love: it can see only itself, it cannot see outside the box it finds itself in. Despair says, because we lack the strength to do what we wish to do, we must give up before we even make the attempt. Despair says, why bother? There is no humility in this: no humble acceptance that all of life is greater than I. I see the sparks of eros moving through even the floorboards of my house today, and I know I am only part of a much greater circuit. The electricity that I see moving in all things, and in my self, is all part of a much greater interconnected circuit; I am only one eddy in that greater river, and everything I can perceive is only one bend of that river that flows endlessly on, circling the world, far beyond my sight.

When we say that “god is dead” what we mean is that we can’t find the eros of everyday life. Dryness of spirit, like abuse of power, comes as no surprise. When Nietzsche first proclaimed that “God is dead!” he meant that the old, sterile, facile images of god (imago dei) were all used up and dried out. Nietzsche meant to proclaim this as a liberation, a falling away of the old and sterile in order that something new and very much alive might take its place. Far too many people have misunderstood: Nietzche was not in fact proclaiming the beginning of despair, but it’s end-point. “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Destroy all images you have of god so that the authentic living Godhead might come in to replace them. Meister Eckhart proclaimed, some centuries before Nietzche, “I pray to God to rid me of God.” He meant that the facile, easy images of the gods that we carry around in us and call upon without much thought, are all false gods. Thomas Merton wrote, “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” Love is eros, love is the life-force, love is life: we swim in a sea of lifelove, if only we would take notice. Here is the cardinal pair that lives in my pines, come to stand in the wind on the lawn, and peck after fallen pine-nuts, before swooping crazily home. Everything that is, is alive.

In three days of strange hot afternoons that have come far too early in the year the lawn is green, the flowers have exploded into bloom, and everywhere birds are doing their mating dances. The sap is rising in the trees. In three days, the trees have budded out. In the woods what was dry and brown and gray and sterile is now misted with yellow-green, the tips and fronds of shrubs and trees alike suddenly haloed with new life. The sap is rising in everything that is enfleshed. Anoint the body, the sap is rising. We are all coming back to life, at last.

•

(Previous Spiral Dance essays can be found here.)

The Most Excellent Human Quality

a Spiral Dance essay

During my usual morning meditation and contemplation time—I start my day with a bit of time for reflection, meditation, etc., as it always makes the day go better—I've been reading a marvelous book on Jewish mysticism. I've read three or four other books on the subject over the years, but this is the best I've ever read. It lays things out beautifully, clearly, and from a deep perspective. Reading this, you realize once again how the core mysticism of so many religious traditions say so many of the same things, that you come to understand that mysticism itself is the core of the religious experience, and the rest of it is just accrued traditions and sidebar ideas. I'm not Jewish, and never have been; but I have been invited more than once into temple to experience that tradition, and I've found a lot of wisdom in the mystical tradition within Judaism; just as I have within Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism, and other traditions. I don't label myself as a member of any of those traditions, although I accept the label of student and follower of the mystical wisdom traditions wherever I find them.

The book I'm reading is by Rabbi David Cooper, titled: God is a Verb: Kabbalah and the practice of mystical Judaism. This is what I read when I opened the book at random today, to continue reading, but not feeling like reading sequentially:

•

It is taught that during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur there are accusing angels and defending angels. If the defending angels do not do their job well, the world cannot continue. So God prepares all defending angels by sending them out to do a task that deepens their understanding. In one situation, God said to an angel, "Go find the most excellent quality of human experience, and return to tell me what it is."

The angel searched around the world. It saw many things. But what most impressed it was an event in which a confused man was standing in the middle of a busy road. To one side another man saw that a large truck was coming down the road too fast and would not be able to stop before hitting the dazed man. So the man on the side rushed out from the curb and reached the other just in time to push him out of the way. Unfortunately, he could not save himself and he was killed by the truck. The angel gathered up a drop of his blood and took it to God, saying, "This, I believe, may be the most excellent thing in human experience, the willingness to sacrifice one's life for another."

God replied to the angel, "You have found an excellent experience, but it is not the most excellent. Go back and find it."

The angel returned to earth and searched once again. It scanned the world, and this time the angel was attracted by the experience of a woman giving birth. The woman moaned and writhed for a long time until as last the infant was born. When she saw its little body, her pain dropped away and a warm ecstasy filled her with love. The angel reached over, took a drop of sweat from the woman's body, and returned to God, saying, "This, I believe, my be the most excellent thing in human experience, bringing life into the world."

Once again, God said to the angel, "Indeed, this is an excellent human, but it is not the most excellent. Try one more time."

So the angel returned again to find the most excellent human experience. It searched very carefully, and being an angel, it could view thousands of events at the same time. Suddenly something caught its attention. A man was running through a wooded area, and he was clearly in a violent mood. The angel quickly reviewed this man's life and found that he had just been released from jail, having served many years for another man's crime. Now, furious, he was out for revenge.

The angel followed him through the woods and saw him approach a cabin. The guilty one lived inside. He was the one who should have served the prison term. When the running man came close to the cabin, he saw a light through the window.

Standing at the window, still bent on revenge, he looked inside and saw his intended victim. The man and his bride of one year had just returned from the hospital with their new daughter. They were as happy as people can be. The angry man looking through the window watched carefully, and slowly his heart broke into pieces. He began to weep and then turned away into the woods, never to return.

The angel gathered up one of his tears and returned to God, saying, "This, I believe, is the most excellent thing in human experience—forgiveness: the ability to transcend anger, hatred, and the desire for revenge."

God congratulated the angel, saying, "Indeed, the ability to forgive is the most excellent gift in human experience. Many other things are important, but this is one of the few traits that distinguishes human potential. As a defending angel, it is imperative that you understand forgiveness; it is the only reason my creation continues. Without forgiveness, all would disappear in an instantaneous flash."

The Jewish mystical point of view is that creation is based upon compassion and lovingkindness. For the Kabbalist, forgiveness does not mean we need to embrace someone who has done a despicable act against humanity. Rather, it is focused on the degree to which we hold on to our anger or our negative feelings.

If the creation were based upon a pure system of reward and punishment, in which punishment would be the instant result of one's actions, we could not survive for long. We do things, say things, and think things that would surely overwhelm us if we had to make instant payment for unskillful behavior. The very idea that there is a time period between one's actions and the resulting "punishment" suggests that the universe is willing to wait, so to speak, for something to mediate the potential punishment.

—Rabbi David A. Cooper, from God is a Verb: Kabbalah and the practice of mystical Judaism, pp. 243-244

•

I know many people who can't let go of their anger. They nurture it, they feed it, if it starts to cool they stoke it up again. They treat their angers and hurts as though they were their beloved children, nursing a grudge beyond all reason. Of course, reason isn't involved.

I've heard many argument about revenge being justice. Some legal traditions openly define justice as revenge tempered with mercy. That's a pretty good working definition, for practical use. But none of these definitions recognize that human law and divine law aren't same; and divine law tends to be far more forgiving than we do.

There are many people I've wronged in my life, and many who have wronged me. Who am I to judge them? Who am I to judge myself? Perhaps there is more going on than I can know, for now. Perhaps each person who comes into your life who hurts you is not a trial and a punishment, but someone with whom you have some sacred contract designed to make you grow up. Perhaps each trial and tribulation is, while not a test, not a punishment, a chance to choose to take the higher road. Each opportunity gives you a choice about how you respond to the experience. We always have the choice to take revenge–an eye for an eye—and we always have the choice to forgive—go, and sin no more. Perhaps that person who hurt us for no reason offered us a lesson to be learned, not about taking revenge, but about seeing our options. And there are often third options.

There are a few points that Rabbi Cooper says in his last two paragraphs that verge of what I've heard the Dalai Lama say: that creation is built on lovingkindness; that the universe is willing to wait to something to mediate the potential punishment. When I encounter such wisdom, it comes from many traditions, from within many religions. It supports my belief that mysticism is at the heart of the world's great religions, and that at core most mystics are saying the same things. Mystical experience isn't for the select few: it's at the heart and core or every tradition, and it a universal human birthright. The rest is local knowledge, local tradition, time-bound and place-oriented, and not as universal. So I find wisdom in all the world's great spiritual traditions, and am more than happy to look into each tradition for what wisdom is there. Sectarian differences are all about who's right and who's wrong, not about what's universal wisdom. I don't think God (or Whatever) actually cares who's right and who's wrong; that's all human law and philosophy, not divine law and the action of grace.

I perceive reward and punishment, the desire to punish for a slight, the anger we carry, the hatred, the desire to be in-the-right (and show everyone else to be in the wrong), the thirst for revenge against those who have hurt us for no reason—I perceive these to be functions of what depth psychologists call the personality-ego. It's the ego that gets offended when slighted; it's the ego that holds onto anger against all reason; it's the ego that feels attacked and must both defend against attacked and also lash out in anger at the attacker. This is all egoism. It's never the higher self that wants revenge, when justice is nothing more than revenge; it's always the lower, basic, egoistic self. Which of course is a really hard part of the self to give up; because when the ego gives up control, even though its control is never more than illusory, it feels like it's dying, and fights mightily to stay alive, in control, in the seat of apparent power. Fortunately, angels are far more kind and loving than most people's egos.

I find it compelling when, in the story, the angry man's heart breaks into pieces, he weeps, and gives up his vengeance. It doesn't even matter that the guilty man never knew how he was forgiven—his own karma, his own lessons in life, are for him to learn, on his own. The wronged man need not intervene. His desire for revenge was for himself, to make him feel better about himself, and like most desires for revenge have nothing really to do with the other person; and when the wronged man lets that all go, he is freed to go live the rest of his life in peace. He frees himself. No higher power frees him, he does it himself. Not even an angel can do more than show you your choices; it's still you make them, and live with their consequences.

I think a lot of people are afraid or unable to forgive because they don't realize, or want to realize, how nobody has responsibility for their lives and choices but themselves. I can think of a few professional victims of my acquaintance who are angry and bitter at everyone and everything, and continue to insist that both their suffering and their revenge must come from others. They have completely given over their power to others: both as victims, and as victors. These are gay men who I have met, who insist that they never did anything wrong, that some outside force is punishing them for no reason, and if they could just get that outside force to back off, they could live their lives in peace. Sound familiar? I've felt that way myself.

What I've learned, though is that forgiveness—and we could also call it mercy, or the action of grace—trumps all my little-ego feelings of being slighted, or of guilt for having wronged others. The action of grace removes karma far more rapidly than we can imagine or believe; forgiveness is also about the future, the good works a person might yet do, the redemption they might yet find. The defending angel has a trump card, once it understands forgiveness: if there is a chance this person under question could do something good, could bring more light into the universe, for someone, someday, then mercy is more appropriate than condemnation.

Forgiveness must be uniformly applied: we cannot forgive others if we cannot forgive ourselves. We must be able to forgive ourselves for all the ways we have judged ourselves harshly. And we have to start with letting go of hating ourselves for being imperfect, impotent, wrong, unable to help enough, unable to be enough, unable to fit others' ideas of what we're supposed to be, unable to take back our power 100 percent, unable to succeed at our ambitions (and don't forget how ambitious we can be spiritually!), unable to just be enough, be adequate to the day, unable to love enough, unable to care enough, unable to forgive enough. Forgiving myself starts with the realization that I'm neither a superhero nor god: I have limits. Today I can find it in myself to forgive more than I could yesterday—and that's enough. If that's all I can do today, it was a good day within creation. Tomorrow, who knows? Maybe I'll do better. Maybe I'll do worse. I have to forgive myself for not always being able to do better, or do more. I live with a chronic illness of which one of the major side-effects is fatigue; I can feel the waves of fatigue literally wash over me, some days, like ocean waves. It's all I can do some days to do one important thing; items fall off the bottom of my To Do list every single day, because of my continuous fatigue. I have to forgive myself for my frustration, for my anger at feeling sick more often than I feel well, for not getting enough done each day. Believe me, some days that is a real challenge. But forgiving myself for my failings and inadequacies is necessary.

And that's why taking revenge is so unnecessary: no-one in the end will judge us but ourselves. We're the ones who weigh our own souls in the scales, and choose what happens next. The gods stand by and guide us, but they do not judge us. This is a LOT of personal responsibility to be aware of—most folks run away from the idea that they have that much power over their own lives. Most folks would rather hold onto their anger and their desire for revenge (which does reinforce the ego's sense of self-importance, after all) than believe how much more power they draw back to themselves by letting that all go. We lock up our personal power in our past, we invest all of today's energy in holding onto what who has hurt us in the past, and so less of today's energy is available for today. It's a powerful thing to live in the present moment; I think many people are afraid of how powerful they would actually be if they just lived for today, with no desire to "fix" the past.

The wronged man whose heart broke into pieces watching at the window, who wept, and went away to live his own life: he understood how much power he had to affect not only the lives of others, but his own future life as well. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."—Gandhi. The man at the window understood that he would only keep himself in bondage, or put himself back in jail, in hell, by destroying the life of the guilty man whose sentence he had served. He realized that he had not the right to seek punishment against the guilty man, because it would harm not only the guilty man but innocents who loved him. He gave up his revenge, not with bitterness, although heartbreak can be as bitter as it is healing, because he knew he had no right to visit judgment on another as he himself had been judged. He could not by taking revenge undo what had been done to him; he could, however, choose to live out the rest of his life starting over as from the beginning, and make it a new life. The guilty man with his new wife and daughter might in fact meet his proper punishment someday; but it would not be up to the wronged man to do it. How could he, who had been wronged, trust himself to stop his revenge before it went too far? So he let it all go, all his revenge, not just some of it, because he knew that whatever accusing and defending angels he had arguing for his life, so did the guilty man have his own. His reckoning, and its timing, its unfolding in time, and whatever mercy given him, was not up to the wronged man, but up to himself, and his own accusing and defending angels.

How can we judge others? How can we know the most fitting punishment for another? Certainly we almost always choose a harsher judgment for ourselves than is necessary. Are we merely trying to drag the rest of the world down into our own suffering? Are we unable to forgive those we hate because they're not suffering as we are? Are we professional victims who demand everyone else be a victim too? We certainly don't judge ourselves well, because we don't have all the facts, or ignore some of the facts, in our judgments of ourselves. Would we do any better towards others? Do we have the right to try? Our justice is always imperfect; perhaps especially the revenge we take on ourselves for those things about ourselves we hate and fear. The wise wronged man knows when to stop, when to acknowledge that it isn't up to him anymore (it never was, really), when to let it go—for his own sake, even more than for the sake of others.

The most excellent human quality is, indeed, forgiveness. And it starts with that person in the mirror.

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(Previous Spiral Dance essays can be found here.)

India In Me

a Spiral Dance essay

There's no doubt that spending my earliest childhood in southern India was a life-shaping experience. All my earliest memories are of India, the land, the smells, the warm tropical nights, the monsoon. Each time I've returned to the tropics as an adult, these earliest childhood impressions surge up again. When I lived and studied in Java, Indonesia, on a Fulbright grant to study gamelan music as a composer, I had many flashbacks and memories come up. It's fascinating how much memory is tied to smells. The smell of rotting fruit under a tree by the side of the house. The smell of enormous, sensual, sexual tropical flowers in all their glory, and the scents being carried more powerfully when the air is heavy with humidity. Whenever I visit a tropical room in a conservatory here in the Upper Midwest, that rooting-vegetation smell, sometimes like old bananas, sometimes like eucalyptus mixed with fig and freshly-turned humus, takes me back. My friends might turn up their noses, but to me it's a scent of home.

When my family returned to the USA, when I was almost seven years old, returning to the Upper Midwest, to the Great Lakes state, Michigan, where I was born if not familiar to me in any memory yet, it was a shock to the system. I was beyond disoriented. It spun me into a shock so profound that I felt both numb and frozen. For one thing, it was cold here all the time, even in late summer. My body still prefers langorous tropical warmth to winter's bitter cold, and luxuriates whenever I can have a sauna or spend sunbathe shirtless or nude on beach sand or granite boulders on a hot late-summer afternoon. I spent my remaining childhood and young adult years, living in Ann Arbor, on the northeast edge of town, going wild each summer, riding my bicycle everywhere, wearing as little clothing as one could get away with, almost always shirtless, tanning each year by summer's end to penny-brown. We're a family of redheads, but I was a strawberry-blond thanks to my mother's Norski side of the family, and I could tan while my sister never could, but just burned. I gloried in the summer heat. People who don't live here often don't realize that, while the Upper Midwest can get terrifyingly cold in midwinter, it can also get very hot in summer. In northernmost Minnesota, some years there can be a 140 degree temperature swing between that week every July or August when the thermometer climbs to the triple digits, and every January when it can sink to 40 below. I've always felt most alive in the heat, most comfortable in my skin. My bad knees stop clicking when I climb stairs. The sweat rolls down your ribs and thighs like baptism.

When we returned to the USA, it was a return to a country, a land I didn't remember. My parents told me we were going "home," but it was to a home of which I had neither memory nor knowledge. A place I felt no connection to. I often still feel like a visitor rather than a native. In fact I've spent more of my life overseas than the average American, much more. That shapes both perspective and attitude.

How do you separate out what's innate and what's environmental? Was I already a shy boy when I was first thrust into the American public school system, finding it hard to make friends, wanting only to be liked but too self-conscious to be self-confident and secure? Or did I become shy because I felt so alien? Nature or nurture? What makes you that way? I know that I was already socialized to converse with adults by that age, as I had no nearby friends my own age in India; we saw each other only rarely. I remember that I was always more comfortable talking to adults than to my age-mates, a feeling that endured into my twenties. Was I already an introvert? Probably. Making friends was doubly hard because I was dropped suddenly into this alien and unknown context, and had to figure out how to adapt on my own. What I loved about school was learning new things on a daily basis; I was a knowledge sponge, absorbing everything as fast as I could. What I hated about school was the people I had to interact with, many of whom I couldn't figure out how to trust.

Imagine, if you will: You're approaching seven years old. You've never in your life seen a television set before, much less watched TV. You've never heard pop songs on commercial radio before. Your parents are both musical, your mother professionally trained in classical music, your father a gifted amateur who's an opera buff; so you've heard mostly classical music and opera on the antique wind-up Victrola record player, usually during and after dinner. Pop music? What's that? You've also been to both Hindu and Muslim weddings, and heard the music associated with those. Otherwise, it was the wheezy pump organ in the church, or the occasional piano. You have nothing in common with your so-called peers in your age category. Not even your language, since you grew up in a relic of the British Empire, surrounded mostly by Canadians and Brits and Indians; you vocabulary is Anglo-Indian, and you drink tea. Soft drinks were a marvel, a world of nose-tickling fizz never before explored. You played tennis on the neighborhood courts in India, when the family was in the hill country, but you've never seen a baseball or basketball before. You love to swim, and love to be in water, but you're otherwise not much interested in sports. It's not that you're not athletic, but that there isn't much common ground. How can you take seriously a game like football where the ball doesn't even bounce properly? Boxing still seems too vulgar to call sport. You're pretty good at volleyball, though. Still. What do you do? How do you cope? Who do you make friends with? Who can you talk to who can understand you, really? Shared experience in relationship is the root of empathy. How do you learn to empathize with aliens who have no idea what you're talking about? Add to all this the teachers quickly singling you out as being one of the brightest kids in their classrooms. No wonder you got beat up and bullied for so many years. Being the teacher's pet was only part of it. School was a glorious trauma for years. The bullying didn't really cease until high school, when for reasons unknown the captains of the high school football team decided that they liked me and suddenly I was under their full protection. I even got invited to the popular crowd's parties a few times, for the first time ever.

Just to be clear, earlier in life this became a spiritual wound, something that forced me to go deeper inside and explore my own experience and inner landscape to find touchstones, when none were provided in the outer world. It was a deep wound, and long an inarticulate one. I still don't really believe that most of my friends can really understand this aspect of myself, so I don't talk about it often. It was a wound. It's not so much of a wound anymore, though. A great deal of it has been healed. And that healing came via self-understanding, by that soulful spelunking that was also necessary refuge. There's always more to discover, of course. Only a fool thinks he knows himself completely. Just to be clear, it's a wound that no longer dominates, that marked me but which I learned from, and which I learned to overcome. There's a scar there, not a seeping sore. I do still sometimes get stuck in acceptance: in wanting to be loved, even in situations in which that desire is foolish. I catch myself at it far sooner than I used to, and do it differently now, after catching myself; that is most of what I can say.

So I've never really felt like a born and bred American. I've always felt a little alien and disconnected to the social structures of the USA. Some of them I like and have grown to align myself with. Others I can only approach as if they were alien microbes viewed under a microscope. I often feel like an immigrant rather than a native. Often I feel a lot of empathy for immigrants, for refugees, for displaced persons, many of whom have survived far harsher circumstances than you or I could ever comprehend. I feel like an outsider in my own land; as I once formulated it for an academic paper on ethnomusicology, an insider/outsider, one with a foot in either perspective, always walking that borderline without ever feeling completely in either camp.

The land of North America itself, though, I immediately connected to. The land itself is what keeps me here, connected and rooted to its beauty and power. The land keeps me alive, and nourishes me in ways other powers rarely do. The land of the Great Lakes region speaks to me as if indeed it were my home. Those times I can best listen, I feel at home here. Just as the mountains of Wyoming and the Southwest also speak of a certain kind of home to me; as does the Pacific Ocean, whenever I am near it. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean are not separate, and I can stand on the shores of California and feel my way across the long water to those beaches near Madras, and north, where I played as a child. I have photos of myself surfing in quiet shallow waters on the east coast of the Indian peninsula; had we stayed near an ocean, rather than the Great Lakes, when I was a child, I might have continued surfing. When the tsunami struck Madras in 2004, it was doubly wrenching for my family because that was our part of India, the part we knew well; some of those beaches were ones we had explored.



And I carry India in me still. My experience of India, which is not a native Indian's, but that of a long-term visitor. Still, children arrive with no preconceptions. They have to be taught their prejudices. Hatred is not innate, no matter what else is, even fear. So children can feel at home even where they know they're not, and where their parents are clear foreigners. How much can a child go native? I don't know; but I suspect more than most adults imagine.

I have an affinity for the Hindu gods of southern India. I feel at times closer to Shiva or Ganesh than I do to any of the Christian saints or symbols. I'd have to call myself a post-Christian: raised in a Protestant faith, a rather intellectual one to be honest, but not attached to either the institution or how it shapes the liturgy. I feel closer to the bhakti poets with their songs to the Lord of the Meeting Waters than I do to gospel music; while I view "contemporary Christian" pop/rock as a chasm of contradictions. (A heavy metal handbanger song about Jesus as your personal savior? It makes one's head spin.) I'm more drawn to individualistic spiritual explorers than to mass worship of any kind; more drawn to monks and mystics than mega-churches. I carry an image of Ganesh in my truck, in his role as Lord of the Crossroads and Remover of Obstacles. The truck feels naked without Ganesha's soothing presence on board. I have a personal altar in my living room, which has both Russian icons of the Sacred Heart, meditating Buddhas, and a large statue of Shiva Nataraj, the Lord of the Dance.

What's the thread that ties all this together? I'm being too revealing in even mentioning any of this, but I've come to believe that it's part of India in me: an eclecticism and open-armed approach to faith that is experiential rather than dogmatic. If you consult the historians and anthropologists you come away with the impression that India is a muddle of thousands of local gods, each expressing something larger behind their local face-masks. Hinduism is decentralized and both regional and local. There is no One Abiding Creed, one set of ultimate truths that everyone can agree to. It's a collection of accumulated local faiths that grew and merged, and overlapped somewhat while still remaining local and personal, both small and large at the same time. Some theologians would no doubt argue with this impression, but in practice it holds a great deal of truth. Different versions of the same gods, arising in infinitely varied manifestations, scatter the landscape.

In the continental USA, I feel many local gods in many places. Some places have a strong spirit to them. A mountain seems to look back at you, when you contemplate it. The bluffs above a glacial lake seem charged with electricity. Viewing the sunset from a natural stone bench above the ocean, trying to catch the green flash, is charged with portent and meaning. How is this different than the Japanese Shinto sense of the kami, the gods and spirits that inhabit specific sacred locations? How is this different from the Native American sense of gods in the landscape, a common thread to several tribal nations no matter what else they might differ on?

This feeling, this universal human instinct to perceive and protect what is sacred in one's own backyard, is a thread that runs through every faith, even the big organized institutional religions; the local spirits might be frowned upon, or they might be acknowledged by being re-labeled as saints or angels. The action of spirit is always personal and local, specific and universal simultaneously. God is a verb. In "religions" which are more sets of gathered myths and traditions than anything formalized and dogmatic and centrally-controlled, this awareness is simply more overt and obvious. It's at the surface of faith, rather than concealed behind a mask of conformity. The individualism of Native American spiritual traditions has become rather well-known; choice and vision are closer to the surface of social awareness. This kind of spiritual practice, local and personal, is why I often joke that I prefer dis-organized religions to those well-organized. Many of the re-invented, or re-discovered, neo-pagan faiths such as Wicca show this style as well. Although one does note that many Catholics converted to Wicca still tend to prefer high-church organized, formal and dramatized rituals over spontaneous kitchen-witch private magick. Perhaps it's all what one grows up with, that sets those preferences. If you're a kitchen-witch in spiritual preference, are you also one in the kitchen, and in your creative work? You see how all this might tie together, more products of personality and early experience than we often care to realize?

Is my worldview more inclined to see the local spirits this way, because of my childhood in India? It seems possible. I do believe it's true that my experience opened up in me the awareness of its possibility. And travel does broaden one's perspective, a cliché that is true at its core. Most people I've met who've traveled extensively do have a different perspective on life than those who never leave their local gods behind. I don't claim to have been specially enlightened by my travels—and yet, there is a difference. Perhaps it's an simple as having more images under one's belt with which to make synergies and comparisons.

And India was where I had my first visionary experiences. I can remember several numinous and liminal experiences that starting ringing through my life as a child. I was probably five when they started to happen; but perhaps they had always happened, and I wasn't sentient enough, as young children are not, till age five to be able to remember them now. I sometimes tell people now that I was five when I first started seeing angels, because it gives them a word whose context and frame of reference they can comprehend; but in fact I don't think of it as seeing angels, or seeing dead people, or whatever, but of having encounters with the local spirits and local gods.

"Vision" is a misleading word because a visionary experience is full-sensory, somatic, spine-tingling, often incredibly sensual, and involves your whole body, your whole spirit, your whole being. It's not an intellectual "Aha!" nor some safely-distanced sight-experience like watching a movie on a big screen twenty feet away from your nose. You're inside it, not looking at it from a safe distance. Rilke wrote Every angel is terrifying and he was absolutely accurate; he also wrote Beauty is but the beginning of terror, and this too is also accurate; although it is often misunderstood as fear of personal (ego) annihilation, although in fact what one most fears is one's inability to share one's experience with others without being completely misunderstood. There's a reason many mystics can't talk about what they've experienced: this is one arena in which words fail utterly. Poets' biases about the power of language aside, even the old Celtic bards knew that there were things they had no adequate word-horde to convey. After beating your head against the stubborn wall of incomprehension for awhile, some decide to stop; and they simply go silent. Not me, though, in my willful and arrogant desire to share; I can't seem to shut up, struggle as I constantly do with the inadequacy of saying anything at all. Why? Because I've seen the look in the eyes of the silent ones, that look haunted with light rather than shadow, that you'd miss unless you've shared the numinous experience of being immolated by the Light. Someone needs to talk about it, for those who can't or won't.

I was trained early in science. I tend to take an experimental and experiential approach to spiritual belief. I base what I know on what I've experienced. I don't accept a lot of received wisdom, and what I do accept I test first against my own cosmology and experience. It's a mystic's way, a shaman's way, a practical way. A way in which spiritual technology lives side by side with Mystery, in which Mystery is accepted rather than denied or attacked. Any faith that gives you all the answers, or tries to, should be looked upon with distrust. Everything is always provisional, and Mystery will always envelop the rest of life.

I was a boy in India when I first started having visions. My first connections to the natural world; hearing the rocks thinking; seeing presences that no one else could see. In India, the world started to open up around in me in ways beyond understanding, expanding and enveloping my small life in something very large and powerful.

I remember one afternoon, when I was supposed to be napping in my room, I snuck out of the house and went over to the laundry area—cement basins and tubs and wash areas, where the servants for all the houses in the compound washed clothes and linens. It was a hot, humid Indian afternoon in the dry season. I snuck into the tubs, there was still a little water dampening the stones, and I took off all my clothes, just to feel the heat of the day on my skin. It was sensual, hot in the air, the stone cooler under my backside. I was blasted with light. I gradually felt overcome with and enveloped by bright white Light. Time seemed to stop. All the sounds around me seemed to recede into the far distance. The Light became everything. I felt tingles of energy all through my body, and I felt everything on my skin, the air, the sunlight, the cool damp stone under me. And in the growing silence, which seemed to last a very long time, I felt something like a smile standing behind the Light. It lingered a long time, then everything faded away back to normal. I sat there flushed, feeling very tired and still. Eventually I put my clothes back on and snuck back into the house, went back and laid on my bed and eventually had a genuine nap. Very little clock time had passed. This happened when I was about five years old.

I remember walking down an aisle of stone statues carved from huge blocks of living rock, a sacred aisle behind the temple of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, in southern India. Many of the statues were carved from boulders and cliffs already there. Life-size statues of elephants strolled down the aisle, in between miniature temples, palm trees, and more. It was dusk. I ran ahead of my parents and our Indian guide, ran down the aisle to tis end then turned to look back and waved. For a moment the light seemed dark and dense, and I couldn't see or hear anyone else; as if they had all gone down another path, and I seemed to be alone. In the purple light of dusk, just after sunset, the elephants seemed to come to life, and walk forward. The carvings were so life-like already, this wasn't much of a leap. Nonetheless they seemed to stride towards me. Then I blinked and the vision was gone, my parents were there again in the aisle, several yards away, and sounds returned, and the light of dusk returned to blue rather than purple. I was probably about 6 years old when this happened.

In India, as a boy, I began having visions. They followed me, and stayed with me. I soon began to realize I was experiencing things other people weren't. They weren't dangerous, and no harm was ever done. It was always full-sensory, often sensual, somatic, kinesthetic, smells, tastes, and hearing—never just sight. Things altered to something else, then returned to normative. There were other events. The common thread that has run through them all, throughout my life, is the experience of overpowering, actinic Light. And silence, in some form or another.

When my family came back to the US, all of this came with me. I was put in public school, and I learned how to learn, always teaching myself more than the classroom alone intended. I learned to discover and research on my own. If something interested me, I pursued it as far as I could. In middle school, I began to read about comparative religion, looking to understand the visions, to find some context for them. To try to understand what was happening, who I might be. That course of study eventually lead me towards panentheism, towards the earth-based spiritualities and faiths, towards shamanism, towards affirmation rather than rationalization. And I begin to think, now, that this is India in me: a cluster of local gods, both immanent and transcendent, both particular and universal, local yet omnipresent. Principles rather than persons. Presences and powers and principalities, very much engaged and alive and active, not distant and removed. No wind-up universes set in motion by some absconded clockmaker. In India, I remember seeing temple festivals and ceremonies in which people were fully engaged, fully participant. Neither abstract nor discorporate, but somatic, direct, personal, touching. Moving, as Spirit moves in all things.

Mysticism has been defined as direct experience of the Divine, without mediation or the frames of received dogma. Mysticism has been described as the core experience of all great religions; the institutional structures are what are local and specific and culturally-bound, while the experience itself is a universal human birthright. Its tropes and patterns and concepts appear everywhere, over and over again. Did India make me a mystic, or would I have had visions at that young age no matter where I was? Nature or nurture? What I do believe is that my childhood in India opened that door to awareness earlier in my life than might have happened elsewhere. It provided a context and framework that intellectual Protestant faiths do not. It may have made me more open, more aware, more available to that Light. In India, a Light breaking through was likely to happen anywhere, anytime. The very land is infused with millennia of sacred action, sacred music and dance, temple worship. The air and ground are so alive.

So, nature or nurture? I'm not sure it matters. Still I carry India in me, an open and inviting door. I carry those many local gods around in me, as Masks of God, presences felt and familiar. The memories last beyond time and place, and connect as one this land I live on with that land I once lived on. I see the same forces everywhere I go, the same patterns and powers. What is universal is very particular, and what is very specific to this place partakes of what empowers that other place. It's the oneness that is made up of the many. The many emanations that arise from the One.

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(Previous Spiral Dance essays can be found here.)