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A friend of mine sent me the horoscope that includes what became the opening line for ‘The Lightning Medicine.’ Initially, I wasn’t a 100% sure what this statement was supposed to foretell about the rest of my day, but then a thunderstorm came later that afternoon to “clear” things up!

No one can give you the lightning medicine, say the people who cannot give the lightning
medicine. — My horoscope, November 1, 2021

A flash
before you in a dark street,
the jump the heart gives
skin alive mind saying
me next
the same path
the same distant
door, how the feet pause
just a breath
here the place
there the journey
home. Like memory
the blaze and fade
of light, and again
and again a loud
warning, if you do not
change you will end
where you are heading,
the sweet scent
of rain after long
drought, the gravity
of destination.
We are the medicine,
you reach that door
the way we give
each of our lives
its name,
and the storm moves on
trailing fire,
oblivious,
but the night
the glorious night.

I wish I could say that I have a formula; that I get up at 5 a.m. every day and write before my son clomps into the kitchen and my dog barks to be let out. It has happened, but I certainly can’t claim it as a habit. I don’t adhere to the practice of sitting in a chair for an hour everyday no matter what. I don’t have a lucky pen.

For so many reasons, some known to me, many unknown, I, a mountain girl, have landed on a boat. This home of mine, this nest of domestic life for the past nineteen years, bobbing on the Bay, blown by gales, baked by sun, is unstable. It is also the primary site of my writing practice. So, in a way, my practice is unstable. It’s a slippery eel. It comes and goes with the weather.

The ocean destabilizes my schedule in ways that I didn’t experience when I lived on land. It’s hard to write with the moon full, the tide flooding, and rain coming down in buckets making everything swollen and bloated. Or a Northeast gale blows in causing the dock lines to creak and strain, the Bay heaving with an increased velocity, until the ocean recalls itself and the Bay drains like a tub with the plug pulled.

It’s impossible to listen for the muse when the ears are keyed up, waiting for the snap, the alarm call that brings the men in slickers and tall rainboots, hoods pulled down over their brows, running with sharp knives on their hips and bundles of line to secure me back in place. Safe again for the moment.

I long for the mythic stillness of a large, oak desk in a dusty library with dim light. A place where, when rain slashes the sky, I can pull the curtain shut and continue my own inner traveling, spinning yarn on a page, undisturbed by Borealis’ temper.

I read that it’s important to be in the moment when writing, that to be present is key. If that’s the case, I’m not sure I am catching the point. Being in the moment leads to much waiting, listening, and gazing at low inland fog as it pours from the Delta. Sometimes the moment brings a pair of otters, or a loon. This season it’s newborn seals, tiny sleek, silver, and black bullets that cry in the night. Their voices so like a wounded person crying for help we’ve established a phone tree in the harbor to confirm, “…yes, it’s the seal babies. No need to call an ambulance.” My son sighs. Water slaps the hull. We rock.

Domesticity is the other oar that steers this writing life. A domestic life is industrious, and one in a maritime environment even more so. People move with purpose up and down the docks. Lily hands aren’t much use here.

When I find still, uninterrupted moments that last long enough to allow a full transition into my creative mind I feel like I’ve won something. I’ve silenced the new mother’s ear. Until a freighter passes too close through the channel, its wake a jolt back to the present, the now.

Motherhood and Nature, two wonderful opportunities to keep me in the now! Writing then, becomes both a defiant and a highly privileged act. A Zen priest said recently “meditation requires chopping through the noise.” Writing is like that for me. So, maybe, being in the now is something that requires more defiance than discipline. Something claimed with a sharp chop. I tell myself that I will write in the face of instability. I will indulge in an act that appears non-essential, frivolous, despite the economy and industriousness of the world around me.

Growing up was a bit like this too – writing was viewed as something other people did, other people who wore ties and had a summer home on the lake. To read, to write, to pursue literature were possible acts of treason. What good is a pen when the floor needs mopping, when a baby needs feeding? When the chores cannot be delegated to another? How can the pen stand up against the worn handle of a woodworker’s chisel, the handle curved to fit the worker’s palm?  Such industry!

For me, any pencil will do, though I prefer a regular number 2. My tools are few and not custom, this is enough to cause suspicion in the people I come from. A shelter I cannot build from such flimsy material. Writing a creative piece for school received brief praise from my mother and was actively discouraged by my father. That is where I discovered there was power in writing, even if it was in a secret journal, or other format not intended for the big world. It was a rebellious act to record my life, to write observations that often led me to the shores of new and different conclusions than what was presented before. Writing, was, and is, a practice of observing, but also of questioning and rearranging the world I live in until I see possibility where before there was none.

There are no academics in my family, no torch to be carried on. No legacy to draw from. A stack of Reader’s Digest on my grandmother’s nightstand is my main literary reference point. They were mostly full of ads and biblical leaning news, and a main feature story of hope. These soap opera shorts were of blindness miraculously cured, a son doing time in prison, and the mother who spreads the word of regret and redemption. I loved these stories for their predictability and for the characters’ names: Florentine, Carol, Frank, Stew.

            Visual art and music were also conspicuously missing from my childhood. The exceptions where the hand sewn clothes we wore, the home decor Mom cleverly made. When I sit down to write, I do not rest on a plush family canon of art and literature. My store house is made of old cable spools used as coffee tables, shelves of scavenged red brick and planks from out back. When I write I do what I’m accustomed to doing: first I chop, then I scrap. I look around. I see what materials are available in front of me. I use what I can from everyday life.

All that ordinary, everyday stuff can be a goldmine. With just the right flash of something that serves as a prompt, I’m off and running. Sometimes it’s just me standing there with my sieve in the rain and it all washing right through the wire mesh, amounting to heaps of nothing. Sometimes I get a good chore list out of the process.

I should mention my natural world catalog I acquired growing up. It’s not a book, it lives in my imagination and plays a large role in my writing practice. In addition to my present day life on the Bay, with its everchanging elements, I have the good luck of possessing a vivid storehouse of memories of the wilderness I grew up in. There are hundreds of buds, bugs, bark textures, types of light, qualities of air that have been cataloged in my brain. For this, I am grateful. It is the backbone of my writing life. Like a squirrel who has multiple stores of acorns, I know if one turns up empty, I can root around in another corner with confidence, I won’t starve for material. I don’t always get a story out of it. It’s the material that gives me sustenance and keeps my writing mind greased, tuned so when the good stuff does show up, I’m ready to make use of it.

Writing is an act of joy and pleasure. When the inner, solitary experience pours out in a translatable way for another person to pick up and experience it feels like magic. I’m not sure how it works exactly, but I do keep a totem jar of pencils that have been sharpened down to an inch of their lives, pink erasers worn flat. They are a symbol that good things can come through this elusive process, that it’s important to sort words on a leaf of paper in hopes of crafting a moment that rights my world anew.

The doctor says my heart is strong
“No problem.”
 
Hearing the results over the intercom
the nurses rhumba on all floors,
patients of every malady joining
in or cheering them on.
 
A marching band turns onto a busy street,
the drivers honking away, in favor.
 
A storm on the verge of bursting slinks
back to hide behind the clouds, the clouds
themselves making lanes for the sunrays
to douse the proceedings in yellow.
 
Is the world coming to me, or am I
coming to it, faithful heart in hand. Either way
No problem.
 

A knock at my office door catches my attention. Looking up, I see Portia and Luca—two of the small group of students I work with—standing there. I beckon for them to come in. It’s not like them to knock, let alone to stand on formality, hovering at the doorway. But I can tell they’re not quite themselves. Standing just behind them is a third young woman. The three of them seem rattled. Their anxiety is palpable; it’s as if their young worlds are tipping on their axis.

This is Thursday afternoon of the last week of classes. The Friday before, on November 14, 2015, ISIS had claimed responsibility for the Paris terrorist attacks, which killed over a hundred and thirty individuals, and harmed countless more, in countless ways. The news, national or international, talks of little else. The campus absorbs the buzz. These were already the dark days of November, when whatever combination of seasonal factors combine with looming exams to elevate stress levels for students.

Everyone was rattled, and at a level beneath, saddened. Paris was on our minds, and felt improbably proximal to those of us living in Kamloops, here in the south-central interior of BC. Apparently, the Paris attacks also loomed on the minds of the less stable among us. Only an hour before this moment, a bomb threat had triggered the evacuation of the recreation centre across the road from campus, a short walk from my office. Hundreds had been rushed from pool and playing field. An adjacent building on campus has also been closed, we’d only just learned.

At my bidding, the three come in and slide into chairs. Their impulse to come to me would have been at least partly pragmatic: Luca has a study session to lead, scheduled to begin at 4:30, hardly an hour away; Portia is to observe part of the session in her role as mentor. The other young woman? I have no idea if she’s waiting to attend that session, or just hanging out with the other two—a friend or younger sibling of one of them, perhaps.

At first, we explore the ramifications for the upcoming session. From its scheduled room on the third floor of the science building, they tell me you can hear the sirens, and see lights from the emergency vehicles that cordoning off the area under threat. Should we cancel the session? Or move to a different location?

No, we decide—or I do, in that moment, keeping barely ten seconds ahead of them. Luca will hold her session as scheduled. But I’d stay and observe, releasing Portia of that responsibility—I carefully explain, moving a full step ahead of them as I improvise. Luca is to keep her session plan light, but busy and engaging. She’ll model calmness; maintaining perspective—or appearing to, at any rate.

The perspective I want, with a sudden urgency, to impress upon these girls is that we are far from Paris. And yet, that we could be inspired by the courage the Parisians were displaying. And that this is in all probability some stupid stunt to toy with our anxiety, playing on that very real and substantial tragedy half a world away. As they listen, they appear to relax before my eyes, to be sinking into their chairs as if they might never leave.

And as their panic eases, I grow angry: that the world is so threatened by these sick and unmoored individuals calling themselves ISIS; and then by the audacity of idiots right here in our own backyard, who, on whatever whim, would further unbalance my students, these bright young women. “They can all just fuck off,” I hear myself saying. And at that moment realize (perhaps prompted by the surprise registering on their faces) that I’ve cursed in front of students. Usually I withhold my less professional, more casual side—at least until leaders have had come to know me better than Luca would, still in her first term as student leader. (Never mind their companion, whom I don’t know at all.)

By now, I’m starting to worry about how many boundaries I may have traipsed across: counselling when that’s neither my role nor expertise; letting my down my guard; and worse yet, might I be putting them in harm’s way? Misreading the seriousness of the threat? As I’m mentally scanning those concerns, the friend speaks up, asking me if I think it would be okay for her to go and get groceries. She’s out of food, and hungry, but her boyfriend has texted to advise that she stay inside.  

All right, I say, let’s think: what would it serve any nut bar to harm us on our not-very-important or prominent campus, here in BC? Do we really think ISIS, or anyone, might boast: First Paris; then Kamloops. Really? She laughs. We agree that it seemed unlikely, compared to the minor, but more tangible, danger of going hungry. With that, I rustle around in my snack drawer and find some granola bars. Which we inhale. And then, giddy on some mix of relief and sugar, off they’ll go: the one whose name I never did learn, to get groceries; Portia home to study; and Luca to get ready for her session. Which she’ll handle brilliantly: a virtual fount of poise and serenity. For the first twenty minutes, I’d watch from the sidelines as clusters of students study biology together, lit at regular intervals by garish bands of blue and red light.

Where are your shoes? Is your body aligned?
The mischief sent with spring repels sun flakes
Banned from patios and decks here in Northside.
While razors flee their own dullness and bits
Their drills, everyone muscles joy from grief
And plans a party for departed and yet
Unborn pets. My poker chips have my name
Engraved above a symbol of the house –
A circle, perhaps the world or perhaps
The Universe with nobody there but us –
Shouldn’t we be more careful if this is true?
Climb on my ray and zoom with me through
Conscious time, through the brick of future, past,
Through the nows that live beyond beyond.
And have we hope? We’re standing in lines
For each other. Hope is this instant, poof, gone,
A prism sphere to turn life around, examine, look
Through again, wedding ring and pix of loves
That lasted. Text me. I’m free afternoons
During the tabulations. Let’s collect symbols
For our main theme, pencil schematics
Of objects and arcs that illustrate these intersections.
Let’s just sit and try to make sense of it.

The urge to build a retaining wall was indirect – you had been talking about your job cutting trails on someone’s property.

The dirt slope was unchanged for decades. I bought a pick and uncovered veins of serpentine running down the hill. The pick fractured them with a satisfying crack.

Decisions can come from unexplained places – they’re orthogonal.

I had a picture in my mind – I’d plant something native. The kids had moved out so there was time. 

Dirt and rock shards tumbled down the hill. The key you said was a level base layer, the foundation for setting the stones. 

I am a beekeeper. I often think of what Marcus Aurelius said, “What Injures the Hive, Injures the Bee.” I was inspired to write this poem after reading a wonderful article by Demian Entrekin, “The We Generation & Why We Must Consider the Stoics Now.”

Naval gazing? So passé.
The Me Generation? Over.
 
That find-your-passion frenzy—
so yesterday. There’s a lifting
 
of vision now, a looking around
even for those
 
who hadn’t noticed
that outsized selfishness is dead.
 
Today there’s a tending to hives
but it’s not just bees, hives
 
and wax that buzz. Heads on our shoulders
are turning slow motion-like.
 
Thoughts hum. It’s making sense:
the rain, the breeze, the scent
 
of nectar flowers, reciprocity: the active
creative    individual    collective world
 
on the way to healing—
being one.
 

                       \

I wrote “Our Town” after spending a late afternoon in springtime experiencing everything I wrote about in the poem. When I sat down to write about the old cedar and barbed wire fencing, and how it made me think of old women playing a game of red rover, I was surprised and delighted by the ending that wanted to be written.

Horseshoe Mountain—draped in a snowy
kitchen apron in spring times—rests her back
against the blue sky. She’s propped up reading
 
the landscape of old paths nearly filled in
with mounding swards of Baltic rush,
a few telephone poles, and ancient lilacs so tall
 
and wide that an outhouse could fit inside
hidden by purple. It’s where
you lie down in green rushes near dry cow-pies
 
because the conk-la-ree of Red-wing blackbirds
was too beautiful to hear, and a bee with saddlebags
of pollen buzzes in a poppy near your ear.
 
You see flashes of crimson épaulettes when
blackbirds all swoop from the blue to perch
on long lines of matriarchs: grey, weathered
 
fence poles shorn of branches and buds, how
they play a lazy game of red rover, too old to run—
their barbed wire arms lifted—holding hands
 
with an iron grip on memories breezing through
of pioneer women in faded dresses
planting lilac cuttings in dark and watered holes.
 

There are no instructions
nothing to navigate by
404 error
we’re already in the rabbit hole
and no we are not in Kansas anymore.
I’m actually on a white leather couch
scanning the Atlantic on a scag of land
deep along the sound
beyond velvet dolphin chatter
ribbons of sliced diced sea
crashing directly into shore
low tide low emotion engine on idle
as we glide zoomlessly into oblivion…
Can you hear me?
I think she’s on mute. What?
He’s frozen,
sort of like Napoleon’s rear guard
stumbling out of the Russian steppes
like me fumbling for the mute button.
So where do we go from here
when here is not that certain
when all we know doesn’t matter anymore
since the Now of the New
is to just chill
ride that low wave pointbreak
shoveling a lonely shore
be the bottom of that skimming stone
hitting the water like that first slap
out of the womb
and how we keep skipping along
getting randomly slapped along the way
but we keep getting up
resilient bastards that we are
always ready for the fight
forever winning near the goal
according to some ancient Greek urn
yet that’s what we all want
some recognition for surviving the fight
a small piece of God’s little acre
finding that pot of gold
at the end of the rainbow.

She said the gleaner would arrive at three.
We visit this widow nearly a year after the loss,
a long suffering for them both.
The sun low, the air cooling, we step
from the glassed-in mudroom into the kitchen
where her bounty of prismed applesauce
lies pooled on the countertops in mason jars.

The sixty-year-old house is redolent of apples,
and farther in, the stuffiness of old furniture,
dust, and the dogs she has trained for years.

Her elbow is sore from peeling, she says.
Her orchard is small, only five trees,
across from a rain-greened horse pasture.
My husband helps her move some furniture back
into a newly painted bedroom. I pass through
the double Dutch door to see the yellow lab puppy,
who nuzzles my hands and bumps against my legs,
then delicately nips a square of quilting material
from a stack and offers it to me to tug.

She points out the room where he spent
his last months, and we settle onto an old sofa
glistening with cat hairs. The window’s light
reveals the thin, haggard face and long, lank gray hair,
her listlessness grows animated only when she
shows us what the puppy has learned so far,
to sit, lie down, wait for a treat, focus on her face.
He may one day become a veteran’s service dog
if she trains him well enough, and if it is in his nature.

The doorbell rings, it is the gleaner who will gather
the fallen apples for whoever or whatever can use them.
No fruit need go unused, even those whose
ripeness has passed, whose grip on the branch
has grown weak, when they lie scattered on the ground.

Why would an “In Memoriam” be in an issue about hope?

Tom was an engineer. He believed in structure and discipline. His life was filled with examples of what such a life could bring to his family and friends and those who had the fortune to spend time with him.

He wasn’t a writer per se, but Tom’s articles that appear in previous issues of Sisyphus are inspired by Tom searching for an absolute truth. Hopefully they inspired others to thoughtfully ponder and continue the conversations started in the articles; maybe encourage a would-be author to reach out.

He was micro-dosing when he had his first stroke and his guide asked, “What do you see?”

“It’s beautiful. Amazing. Truly amazing,” he replied, enraptured by what he witnessed. “I’ve got tell Charles about it.”

Tom wasn’t just a colleague and friend, he was also a co-grandparent. I never found out what he wanted to tell me. I am sharing the following letter to Tom because a Buddhist nun at the memorial considered this a teaching letter. And what is writing but personal passion shared freely with a reader, in hopes for universal conversation? One can only hope, at some deeper level, that Tom’s passing was his response at finding an absolute truth that was beautiful and that he was at peace with his discovery.

The song below is “Life, Grace, Trust” by Kate Munger, performed by the Threshold Singers of West Wales.– Ed.

Dear Tom,

We’ve talked many a time about Buddhist ideas, about how the stories we tell about who we are, are just stories. There is no self. You maintained mindfulness is a secular form of Buddhism, and how one needs to let go of one’s obsessions/fixations/attachments. More than that, you proposed, “this ‘goal-less’ goal is a form of awakening that yields ‘living in the world but not entangl[ing] with it.’”

I am finding focus difficult to do tonight with you in your coma after two massive strokes. You had a stroke. It looked like you were going to survive it. Then you had a second stroke that wiped out what you had remaining from the first stroke. Now the Tom I knew is lost in a forever coma that will take him down. Why does this happen? Why am I not prepared to deal with it?

Tom, I have addressed this letter to you starting before you passed on, but now that you have passed, I think, “Who should I address it to now?” You are not in this world. You are not anywhere. So now I think about what it means to be dead. Maybe we return to the beginning of all life. Most of us take all of this for granted, how all life participates becoming our world, this amazing planet we live on, how it can be lost.

It’s startling to think you are not here on this planet, that your loud bellowing laughter won’t be ringing through the hallway. That your generosity and kindness toward everyone are now memories. When blindness progressed and I couldn’t drive to meet you for lunch, you volunteered to drive me and you to the restaurant. Because I am immunosuppressed, when COVID struck, you volunteered to pick up sandwiches and come to my house. You never failed to be at my side, bringing me a plate of food, letting me take your arm to walk from one place to another, talking with me when I felt washed ashore and isolated. You lent your tools to your son-in-law and crawled under the house with him to investigate plumbing problems. You, at 80 years old, helped him to figure out how the electricity works in an induction stove.

I think about how you said you got up every morning and meditated an hour before breakfast. It reminds me how much your practice influenced your behavior and your relationship to me and our discussions. From a Buddhist perspective it is a matter of viewing the world through the lens of compassion, recognizing the interconnectedness of the world, you said. We are bereft of time affluence, you noticed. Economic growth is antithetical to environmental health. You and I used to get together and discuss this kind of Buddhism.

I miss you, Tom. I miss your Buddhist training which carried you and me into a place there was no self, only invented stories. Yours is perhaps one of the brightest.

I believe these thoughts of yours will live on in the friendships you have established, in the sense of peace and goodwill that you spread before us like a prepared meal, concepts and understanding that will exemplify one of your favorite sayings, “Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.” Tom, you join with all of us together in our memories.

–Love, Charles

A full generation has passed
When I hear your voice
Swirled in a turn of phrase
The way you turn a phrase
In upon itself:
High mineral content
A certain degree of lightness
And agility
Subtle overtones of peony
A touch of pleasant tension
Yet approachable in its evolved structure
And I fall into it
As I fell into it
A full generation ago
The complex notes of your song
Dancing against the swill.

Frank was on his way to a meeting when he got a text that the meeting had been cancelled, so he decided to take himself to breakfast. It was Thursday and just past eleven o’clock, a little late for breakfast on a weekday, so when he walked into Burnt Toast, a classic greasy spoon that he had been to a few times and could see himself becoming a regular, he was one of only three seated at a long counter. 

At the grill was a middle-aged African-American man named Tyrone that the wait staff usually addressed as T. Tyrone had a shaved head with a spider web tattooed into his scalp. He had a thin waist and broad shoulders, and, as Frank had noticed when he first ate here, his hands and forearms were oddly asymmetrical. Tyrone’s right hand was enormous, with fingers like kielbasa, and his forearm was muscled like Popeye the Sailor. His left hand and forearm were small by comparison, appearing almost shriveled. Frank wondered if the right was bigger and more muscular from years of strenuous tasks that required only one hand, or if the left had been deteriorated by illness or injury. Perhaps Tyrone was born with this strangeness, and his genetic propensity for it was something that had been passed down through the generations and somehow traceable to the ships that brought his enslaved ancestors to this country from Africa, yet another putrid aftershock of this country’s cruel and unpardonable sin. Frank thought, Is everything about today’s America understandable primarily as the legacy of slavery?

Each time Frank had eaten here, Tyrone greeted him as he did everyone seated at the counter, with a jaunty salute and a big smile. But today, as Tyrone stood about six feet down the counter putting take-out orders in cardboard containers, he spoke directly to Frank in an accent so thick and unfamiliar that Frank could barely discern his meaning from body language and facial expressions. Did Tyrone know that Frank couldn’t understand him, or maybe he didn’t care. Did he use it as a filter, as in the people who really know me have no problem understanding what I’m saying? Or maybe he just liked fucking with the white people who were obvious transplants to New Orleans by seeing how long he could go on talking before they said something or just gave up. Frank was finally able to make out the word, “usual,” so he said, “Sure, T, thanks,” assuming this meant Tyrone remembered what he had ordered before, a chili-cheese omelet with rye toast and a fruit cup, no grits or potatoes.

Frank appreciated this interaction with Tyrone, and was flattered to be recognized and remembered. Frank ate out often, mostly alone at the counter or the bar, and had lots of longstanding relationships with servers, bartenders, cooks. Some blossomed into deeper friendships, but most didn’t, even though they were a significant and valued part of Frank’s life in New Orleans, where so many smart, fun, and kind people of all backgrounds worked service jobs. Occasionally, the transactional nature of these relationships picked at the scab of Frank’s loneliness, and he recognized that, friendliness, familiarity, and frequency aside, there was something artificial and impermanent about these relationships. At some level, he knew that his friends-across-the-counter were, as the song says, paid to smile.

After a few minutes, Tyrone delivered Frank’s breakfast. As he stepped back to the grill and wiped his hands on the dish towel he had tucked into his belt, Frank noticed again the oddness about his hands and arms. Frank considered his own hands, and the oddball way in which he was ambidextrous. There wasn’t anything he could do equally well with either hand, but rather, he did some things with his right, like throwing, and other things with his left, like writing or brushing his teeth. He looked down at his hands to see if there were any visible differences. There weren’t.

Frank was emboldened by the flattery he perceived in Tyrone’s attention, and flattered himself by deciding that he was now officially a regular. He called down the counter, “Hey, Tyrone. Can I ask you something?”

Tyrone turned and took a few steps toward Frank. “Sure, my friend. What’s on your mind?” It struck Frank that up close, he could understand T perfectly. From any more than a few feet away, with all the kitchen noises, forget it.

“I don’t mean to pry, but what’s with your hands? You know, the different sizes?” Frank motioned with his hands as if he were tossing a tennis ball back and forth. “How did that happen? Were they always like that?” Hearing himself, Frank immediately thought the question might be inappropriate, and his casual tone and presumption to ask disrespectful.

“Thank you, my friend,” Tyrone said with a big charming smile. “Yeah, you right. All day long.” With that, he stepped back to the grill and began to flip the dozen or so pancakes sizzling on the hot metal.

Frank thought if he asked again, if he persisted by calling out his question across the counter, that it would somehow be worse. Either Tyrone would continue to misunderstand, or he would be put off by an intrusive question, or he’d be annoyed by the difficulty of communication between them. Frank knew that any interaction with Tyrone that took them beyond the paid-to-smile pleasantries would require that he traverse not only the service divide, but geography, race, culture, lineage, class, privilege, … But Frank wondered what it meant to let it drop, to not even try. Was that offensive in some way? Was it racist? Did it reveal that any attempt at even casual conversation was nothing more than a sham, an awkward courtesy that was, underneath the facade, discourteous? Did any of this matter to Tyrone?

Frank was still struggling for what to do, here, now. Should he ask again about the hand? And even if he did, Tyrone was certainly under no obligation to talk about it. What made Frank think he was entitled to an answer anyway, that it was okay to intrude like that? Would Tyrone appreciate it as a sincere and empathetic question from a regular, or was he sick of explaining it because people asked about it all the time. Frank wanted to say something, anything for a moment of connection. After a few seconds, he blurted out, “Hey, T. Can I get a side of bacon?” and immediately felt as if this knee-jerk default to their “service” relationship only lengthened the distance between them.

Tyrone nodded slightly without saying anything, or even looking back at Frank. He reached up and grabbed a handful of bacon from a metal tray on a high shelf. He dropped it on the grill where it hissed and sizzled.

does it take to bring
a difference in quality,
 
the water overflowing
its vessel, escaping
its shape
though the change
was a slow building,
incremental.
 
The eye seems a revelation,
but invertebrates
are clothed in skin
that senses light.
Living things moved
toward sight
before it had a name
 
Is it like that to move
toward compassion?

Summer of 2021

Over my 20 years of teaching high school, I’ve learned that if I don’t take some time to do absolutely nothing during the first weeks of summer break, there’s little hope of entering any creative state during my time off, let alone a transcendent one. The muse just won’t show up unless I force her presence with a sustained period of militant idleness. This is especially true after a particularly challenging high school term. The 2020-2021 academic year had been just that, a bewildering “hybrid” of many sorts—in-person and online classes, surprisingly affectionate yet eerily detached students, frustratingly chaotic yet refreshingly innovative new systems. I knew that if I didn’t get some distance from it immediately, I’d spend the whole summer recovering, not writing. So, as soon as classes ended and I had finished my last performance of the season, I rented a car and got the hell out of New York City.

When I arrived at my cousins’ country home in the Catskills, I dropped my bag in the master bedroom, walked out into the blazing, late-morning sun and sat down in the backyard to meditate. Just as I crossed my legs, a dragonfly alighted on the dried stalk of a tall rhododendron at the height of my eyes. At first, I was careful to stay still, worried that it would scare and flee. But I understood quickly that my movements would in no way influence its determination to stay just inches away from my face for almost an hour, except for when, every few minutes, it would circle around the bush and me, (45 times, I counted), after each revolution returning to exactly the same spot right in front of my nose. Its perch was so close that I could clearly see the irregular outline of an indentation on its back from which its iridescent wings radiated. As I closely scrutinized this dent, which resembled the impression of a footprint or a bite mark, I suddenly had the feeling that this insect was all I was, or that all that I am could be contained in an insect. Yet, at the same time, I felt that the insect was vaster than I could ever be, and of much more importance. Then, when those seemingly opposing feelings wore off, the folly of the whole idea that we were at all different by any degree came sharply into focus and for a little while we remained completely merged.

To believe that we are any different from a tree or an insect is madness, I thought. Then I thought how presumptuous it was of me to anthropomorphize nature to any degree! And this second thought brought to me a pang of regret for all the animals and plants I had contemplated in the past: Had I asked the consent of every tree I’d talked to before unburdening myself? How did I know they were down for hearing my human nonsense?

Any experienced meditator will recognize this jarring double-take as par for the course in meditation: There’s a very individualistic part of our psyches that instinctively resists states of oneness and asserts itself by ripping us out of a beautiful contemplation by any means. Nonetheless, somehow on that day on the grass, Dragonfly’s magic helped me assimilate even this flight of attention into the very state of union my ego had attempted to flee. I contemplated this sense of oneness. What is its quality? Is it characterizable? If so, how?

The skein of the universe, that commonality that unites all things—like the recently-discovered full-body organ named the “interstitium” that encases all organs and systems—manifests as very different things to different people, but is, constantly and statically, the same throughout these seemingly individual experiences. It’s not sufficient to say that (Dude…pass the spliff) “all is one” or that “the commonality is greater than the discord” because the phenomenon is both grander and simpler than that. It can only be alluded to by example, so, God help me, let me try:

It is only by way of this universal, interweaving, interstitchumy quality that your astrology is your childhood, and your childhood is your astrology. It is by the grace of this grand, amorphous, primordial communality that your tarot reading is both a representation of the contents of your mind and a clue to what is outside it. It is by this mysterious, unifying totality that you can simultaneously change your life anew with every thought and harmonize yourself with what has already been created. It is by the power and ease of this ineffable mystical yoking that we can experience god within and god without, and how we remain both human and divine.

Yet, in our very-human striving to find continuity in all things, we are always in danger of disrespecting the diversity of Nature’s great, fragmented, wild holiness. When we round off the edges of seeming incongruities, merge similarities or downright fail to honor the mismatched, fragmented, unruly whole through its beautifully disparate parts, we do ourselves and our fellow beings a great disservice. To achieve any sense of peace, any belonging, or at the very least, a true sense of compassion, all differences must be embraced wholeheartedly. Every one. Without exception. This includes everything from Nobel Prizes to childhood cancer. Yeah, it’s a tall order.

But as I sat with Dragonfly that day, contemplating her multidimensional interrelatedness and fractured wholeness, I realized that while I’ve rarely had trouble extending understanding and acceptance toward others (Trumpers, Covid-deniers, social conservatives, etc.) as varied expressions of the divine, I’ve had an unusually hard time accepting myself! Who knows why I am so damn hard on me? I feel the need to be more, or different, or better.

Perhaps I’m just a rather extreme expression of what the yoga scriptures term “anava mala”—roughly translated from the Sanskrit: “not enoughness.” Isn’t it groovy that there’s a Sanskrit word for this? Anava Mala describes the inherent feeling in the heart of humankind, an “original taint,” the disturbing feeling that something is wrong with us, that something should be different. According to yoga philosophy, it is simply this “notenoughness” that obscures our innately enlightened natures. I think, despite all my inclusivity and compassion, that the inherently varied and fractured nature of existence is simply “not enough” for me. I fail to see the whole in its parts. I have a hard-on for metaphysical harmony at the expense of existence’s beautifully banal particulars.

Dragonfly helped me understand that far from a desire to be seen correctly, or meaningfully, or thoroughly, the only “original taint” I have is the desire for continuity. I don’t believe in sin, or penance, or really any wrongness at all, but if there were any real crime against god of which I am guilty, it would be my inordinate longing for a contrived wholeness. Somehow the differences, the mad, wild, differences are never enough. I am guilty of philosophically forcing an existential consistency that is disrespectful to Nature herself. I desire “oneness” in ways that are less than spiritually sanctified, as if this desire itself were productive, that it would bring peace. Alas, no. The peace is in the pieces, in the chaos and complexity.

I think we are all a bit guilty of looking for continuity. It’s in the reptilian mind, that pattern-seeking survivalist instinct we so often explain away as a thing of the past, as if the Paleo Diet were the only vestige of our millennia of evolution. I suppose this is why we meditate, if we do. By closing our eyes and watching the mind grasp and aver, expand and contract, we experience this individuation and impersonality repeatedly, until (most of) what we see with our eyes open is somehow both intimate and detached enough for us to bear.

If you’re not a meditator, I’m sure you’ve been somewhere relaxing, perhaps on vacation, when a feeling of ease finally comes over you and you’re momentarily free from your daily grind—only to get a sudden surge of anxiety about some duty left undone in your work-world. There are fight/flight, evolutionary explanations for this, of course, but let’s put aside the Darwinian for the spiritual: This ubiquitous phenomenon of merging/dissolution/reconstitution is why every single time you have a peak experience, feelings of loss, despair and confusion inevitably come next. A complete disintegration of what you conceive as permanent about yourself is virtually guaranteed to follow any experience of oneness, just as the ego’s reassembling of itself is certain to follow any momentary respite from its tyrannical presence. What is hardest for us to accept is this: The dissolution and confusion—not the heightened state of oneness on the top of Kilimanjaro—is closer to the truth of our nature, if we could only remember this while we’re in its throes.

I believe that finding beauty in a state of dissolution is crucial right now, as I’m afraid to tell you there’s little hope for healing our environment. What they taught me in the 1980s about exponential global warming is coming to pass and anyone who tells you differently should rightly cause you to feel the grating psychological friction of the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It’s too damn late and you’ve got to know it, or at least feel it, which is even more discomfiting if you’re not acknowledging it. Any residual desire for continuity has been intrinsically thwarted by nature of simply being alive during these “trying times.” We are death doulas to the world in this era of its existence.

I’m not suggesting that we throw up our hands in defeat and stop recycling or limiting our carbon footprint. We must continue to care for the earth and engage in rituals of respect, but only because it’s beautiful and honoring to do so, the price of admission for living here, and NOT because doing so will stave off her sweating us out, which is all but inevitable. We are here to honor the end of this cycle of abuse, just as the last, childless siblings of an old family line take domestic violence, mental illness and alcoholism with them, smilingly, at their hereditary dusk. Of course, if somehow all of us conspired to end our legacies of pillaging the earth without expectation of environmental salvation and simply for the honor and beauty of doing so, we might actually generate the momentum needed to arrest global warming, just as we could stop Coronavirus in its tracks only two weeks from today were we able to unite the world around one singular purpose for that sliver of time. However, the odds of both happening are slight.

But here’s some hope: The great boon of my 20 years teaching 8^th and 9^th graders is that I get to witness how each class is effortlessly closer to developing just this unconditional respect for the earth of which I speak! I can’t quite tell you why these students come to me so wise—that will have to be the subject of another essay—but if I were to conjecture, perhaps it’s the availability of so much pre-loaded information. They’ve learned to attend to so many things at once that their hyper-processing brains can hold enough complexity to weather the disintegration around them, rendering them more susceptible to the ineffable, chaotic, quixotic quality of wisdom.

I can’t tell you why these kids come to me so cool, but I’m here for it. For all their seeming distractedness and alienation on the surface, it’s clear that GenZers are authentically connected through their technology, like the mirrored canopy of roots that connects the entire forest underground. Indeed, if I didn’t teach adolescents, I’d probably be really depressed about the state of things.

Of one thing I’m certain: It’s our charge to live beautifully as the world wanes—well, not the world, just humankind as we know it—and concentrate on nurturing the few, fine seeds that will live on in a form we cannot see or even imagine, a continuity our collective ego cannot control, characterize or colonize. No overlord class will emerge from bomb shelters in New Zealand to reboot civilization where we left off. It will be something less direct, less linear, how The Last of Us will live on.

The Maya may have destroyed their environment, too, and suffered the consequences, but we know their culture never ended, that indeed it carries on today, represented in such multicultural symbolic complexity as the Virgin de Guadalupe, just as centuries of West African culture are imbued in the spirituals of the Black church, or how, in the late albums of Miles Davis, whose tracks he refused to name or credit so their magic couldn’t be captured by the suffocating dominant culture, unnamable magics persist. We will continue within the diffusion, and the heart of humanity will be carried on in its complexity. As the great Jessye Norman said of the song “Amazing Grace,” ‘The words may have been written by a Scottish-American, but the melody sounds West African.’ There’s the words and there’s the music…

The ancients believed they could perceive
any person’s character by studying their laugh.
 
Although it fell out of favor ages ago,
this art might be a boon in these dark days.
 
So laugh,
and let me tell you who you are.
 
Set a feast on a blanket in the sun.
I will listen as the laughter pours out like wine.  
 
Seek the wisdom of a balloon in flight.
I will hear you giggling on the breeze.
 
Mortgage tomorrow for a carousel ride today.
I will heed the gleeful gales of childhood recaptured.
 
Climb a tree in every season,
I will comprehend the taxonomy of joy.
 
Who knows what we might learn
from the geloscopist’s craft.
 
Let’s just dare to laugh,
and be whoever we hope to be. 

The Entrekin Foundation is a proud sponsor of this documentary of Berkeley poetry and history.