Antidotes #11-16: for holiday burn-out

Be careful with vows. It is dishonorable to be forsworn. ---Ancient Pagan teaching. I am forsworn. Despite my best intentions, I did not post Antidotes 11-16 on December 11-16. There are two explanations, the first too easy, the second more pertinent to the essence of this blog.

I drove from Bend, Oregon to Flagstaff, Arizona in order to hunt for the house that will be my new home. A generous son and his wife wants to invest in a house. I will have a home rent-free. If you've followed my blog, you know that I (and many writers) are living at a time when it is impossible to earn a living from our work. My Social Security is tiny because I've been self-employed for years. Living rent-free will allow me time to write.

Within hours of being on the road, driving south through Oregon sage and volcanic basin-range, I began to feel alive in a way I hadn't in years. Part of the renewal was knowing I was heading Home; another part was driving in the three-dimensional world, the multi-sensory world. I stopped often to walk over obsidian-littered sand, to breathe in the fierce green scent of sage, to close my eyes and feel sun on my face. I thought hard about the disconnection of too many of my hours on the inter-net. If I still bet today, I'd bet you know. There is more than one way to burn-out. Our brains are not made of pixels.

I stayed with a friend in Flagstaff. On earlier visits, I'd boot-legged his neighbors' wi-fi. This time it was not possible. Much of what I wanted to send as Antidotes for this blog was in my computer. I could have gone downtown to Macy's, a coffee-house with wi-fi and the most exquisitely roasted coffee in America, but I kept putting it off. By the second day I knew I didn't want to spend more than a few minutes on the inter-net. I used my friend's computer for a few emails, and spent the rest of the time walking a loop trail in a meadow full of golden grasses at the base of the sacred Mountains and the red dirt road that takes me to the center of my life: the seven-tree cluster of Ponderosa Pine near my old cabin. I spent face-to-face time with friends. I found myself often with tears in my eyes. Through them, the wildly expanding universe of the inter-net seemed galaxies away.

Two explanations for breaking my vow to post every day till Winter Solstice: Inconvenience, hunger for real life: which is the less honorable of the two explanations for breaking my vow? Your call.

Here are Antidotes 11-16:

Antidote 11: A few nights ago we walked out into the desert. I took him to the ruins of what might have been a smelter and a four-room house. A stone well is still there. Kids have filled it with dead branches, wire and cans. As always, I thought of how the desert eats everything.

Further up the dirt road, we turned toward the east. The sun burned polished copper over the mountains behind us. The light on the mountains ahead flared hot rose, then cooled to ultra-violet.* We walked up the narrow dirt road, past a gorgeous collection of empty plastic cigarette lighters glowing emerald and yellow and scarlet.

We both saw it at the same time:

a seated Buddha statue on a log

a person wrapped in a gray cloak

a Buddha

a threat

a Buddha

a lost soul.

We moved toward the Buddha. I was afraid. I remembered once walking alone, seeing the gray shape and feeling my heart leap. My fear had been of a human, of a man both unpredictable and unknown, a man who might hurt me---or who would be hurt by my fear that he was dangerous. I had crouched in a wash until I calmed.

My son and I took slow steps. Slower. The figure was still, its back straight, its concentration absolute. At about twenty feet, Buddha resolved into the stump of a branch jutting from a downed Joshua tree. We retraced out steps and walked again toward the Buddha. Again it became a tree.

When a Tibetan Buddhist finds a natural form that resembles the visage or body of a god/dess, the Buddhist believes the rock, the tree, the whirlpool or slab of melting ice is an Embodied Deity. No Canon is required. No Ceremony. Only light and time.

Antidote # 12: Luna Mesa - The last three nights I watched the moon rise. Not only its size but its color shifted---from shell pink to cantaloupe to deep rose-gold. A year or so ago I prayed to be restored to joy in the ordinary blessings. I find that my prayer is being answered by this desert and by the deep shift that is occurring within me. Most of the internal change is a mystery to me. All I can do is be grateful.

Here, from last night:

...walked for an hour and a half as the light went from too much to burnished to cool gray. I was heading back when I saw a jade-green snake coiled in a perfect circle. Its head was slightly raised, its tongue testing the air.

A few seconds later I found a delicate feather, downy white near its spine, barred cream and brown toward its tip.

I had spent the day fighting various ghosts of "what if". The snake and the feather slowed my heart.

Antidote #13: A week later, my son and I climbed up a basalt boulder slope and rested, looking out over the twilight desert. It had been too long since I had felt harsh rock under my hands, had felt my breath catch as I teetered at the balance point and pulled myself up.

We sat on boulders. A bird hunted insects on the slope below. It lifted, startled and skittered around us. my son said, "What I like about the silence here is that I just heard that little bird fly by." He extended his hand palm down to the ground and fluttered it.

"Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr."

Antidote #14: (January 2008)

Barn’s burnt down

now I can see the moon.

---Masahide

All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.

---Kung-fu Tze

I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city. In its outskirts I could be anywhere: Phoenix, Chapel Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff. The city has perished. Or been transmuted by the kiss of vampires.

Still, instructions drift through the eye of the needle. From Masahide. From my younger self. He tells me there is radiance beyond charred black. I tell my future.

I once wrote: That double light of story and connection has shone true---on the levelling and subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as thoroughly as bone by cancer.

Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story and the possibility of connection, delicate and essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named Mojave wash---or any first meeting.

Over the last four years, the double light of story and connection began to fade from my life. In the last year I came to doubt that it would do anything but disappear. A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a stump by the busy work of the forest service; the double-trunked pine behind my cabin---women and men, stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine and fragile tether.

Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute for Creative Writing summer writing conference had been killed. For ten years or more, writers and teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week of work and beauty. A month ago, a gifted editor and even more gifted friend told me that it had become impossible to publish the books she loved; and then another equally fine editor and friend said identical words.

I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out through computer keys, I was where I needed to be. I walked with friends, sat with the trees. The darkness grew.

Antidote #15: (December 2007)

I hunt the eclipsing moon. Who hasn't? I am in

Phoenix. There is no moon. There is a glittering

lattice that might be the Roller Coaster of More Then

You Ever Wanted. There is neon, seductive and empty

as What You Got. There are tourists caught in the glare

of headlights. There is no moon.

I walk back toward the Mission Palms, the hotel in

which there are palms, but nothing holy. A parking

garage lies to the east of the hotel. The steps and

stairwell are filled with shadows. I take the

elevator to the top floor. There is no moon.

I walk carefully down the steps. I consider how fear

is the ultimate boredom.

**************

I give the moon thirty minutes to show its diminished

self. I go to the open-air pool. As I step through

the glass doors, a drop of rain touches my face. I

stop at the edge of the hot tub, take off my sandals,

roll up my pants and sit on the edge. The water is

not the perfect heat of the mineral spring I was held

by in the California desert---but it is close.

There is no moon.

Lightning ripples and slashes along the northern

horizon. I don't no how long I sit in perfect

delight, but all that time, there is no moon.

************

Thunder cracks outside the bedroom window. I open the

curtains. Lightning jitters above the city lights.

And there is the moon. Full. Fat. A smudge of pale

cinnabar across the top. Clouds drift and are gone.

I watch until my bones are rich with what I have

missed for so long.

Antidote #16: (today)

Somewhere between Reno and Beatty, Nevada, I have to take a leak. I pull over at the edge of a creosote-studded playa. I open the passenger-side doors of the Vibe and crouch between them on the sand. A few trucks roar by. No-one beeps or waves. I am tiny and I am part-of the sand and dry bushes. I, who have always longed to be seen, am invisible.

I pull up my jeans. A ferocious wind rips across the playa. I feel myself flayed, particles of ease and discontent carried away. The highway is empty. I cross to the other side and study the ground. There are the predictable shards of broken beer bottles and then, a sliver of what seems to be black glass. It is not glass. It's obsidian. I walk deeper into the playa and find an ant's mound. There on the lip of the opening is a black and gray obsidian flake as long as the first joint of my little finger. The edges have been worked. I pick it up and test the edge. Sharper than a razor blade. Sharp as my intention to go Home.

photo: New York Times