When evening comes you can see something which is pensive, hidden, reluctant to flower: that thing in matter which is allied with the kingdom of death. There is always a glow to it. And it reveals itself at the end of the day in the moment of letting go. It is like the twitch or flutter by which a liar reveals himself. Yes, it is pleasant indeed to turn away from the face of God and rest alone in your fastness
It felt as if I were looking backward in time, both here and there; recalling a memory, some things very clear and others, for unknown reasons, vaguely formed. I had a sense of mystery and good fortune yet a little disembodied, released from the immediacy of desire. I was neither body or soul but precisely both and neither. Longing was there and not there, a memory as well as an intent or purpose.
It is, perhaps, a photo of the Bardo zone, looking back on that time just before rebirth when you cannot recall what it was like to want something, and yet, even then, a vague not unpleasant disquiet leads you to choose to be reborn.
There on the other side of the bridge another life begins.
The falls was never a winter place for me; it has always been overlaid with boyhood summer adventures; playing pirate or cowboy along the creek through a forest park that seemed unexplored and vast. Last year I decided to see it in winter.
At the falls, ice limned the shapes of rushing water like a memory. There was no sparkle; the forms were unchanged, but life had gone away.
The place was private now, waiting, turned inward. Perhaps it was like married love, where aging together strips away everything that does not matter. You become aware of the wintering of flesh, hers, yours, and of her particularity. You discover how the body becomes a carnival mask, which tells you little about the person who now wears it. The girl of summer is still there, but there is winter too.
I now wear the mask of an old man, she of an old woman. Yet somehow little has changed, though nothing is the same. We can still see through the carnival disguise, and find the lover who began it all. A good dinner, talk and some wine helps
You would think an old man should be wiser. But at times I still pause when the chime strikes midnight and my mind has the thought: “How does this keep going on?”
But my heart says: “She wore a different mask years ago, and you believed it was her. Who was the fool?”
So, I have learned that once you accept that you are a fool and there is no hope for it, life opens up again. When you give up knowing things and float on the ocean of God’s foolishness you begin to trust your heart.
So that day at the falls I stood by the parapet on the overlook and suddenly, in memory, I had my cap gun holstered on my hip, ready to charge up the path on an adventure. -I felt love for that boy, his imagination, his good heart, and his delight in everything that sparkles. – Neither he nor I were going to be fooled by frozen water. The falls had on a winter mask; but lovers and the boys of summer do not believe in winter. It is a snapshot in time, no more.
What I call myself seems to have become a crowd of places and moments. The boy of summer, the young lover, the husband, the father are not gone. What has changed is that there is now a watcher behind a mask, beguiled, but not taken in. The watcher lives in every season, and no season, traveling back and forth in dream and reverie. -And grateful to have a lover for companion on this strange journey.
The waitress who serves our slice of pie when we go out for a dessert thinks we are a “cute old couple” (I overheard her saying this). -She won’t know until winter comes to her what things are possible in the winter season.
Wherever it takes place, writing seems to require you to locate a larger Self from where the words can come. -I don’t know why this is, but as long as I am somebody, nothing will happen.
So, I go out most days, and rent a table for the price of a coffee in a place where I am probably only known as ‘the old guy who scribbles.” When I encounter the familiar strangeness at the spot, I can pull off my selfhood like a sweater that is too small.
-However, in an unfamiliar cafe it is hard to resist imaging a role for myself: literary man, mysterious stranger, … I try on a series of identities, like suits, where nothing fits and each is too much or too little of something. –After a while, I realize that once again, I am seeing myself through the eyes of strangers.
How is it that after all these years, I still believe that being this particular Thomas is not enough, even though my wife claims to know otherwise (and she is very smart).
I think God has tried to write me letters on this subject, but I have a hard time accepting anyone’s word. And after all, if what She writes is true and I believed it, I would weep and the world would become utterly strange. I would have to keep asking strangers what things were called. And I would need to learn to walk once again, how to tie my shoes and boil water. It would be difficult.
But then I laugh and take a sip of coffee. I guess I will take Her word for it today, even though I don’t quite believe her.
The light expressed a musing solitude on my early morning run; regrets, pleasures, unfinished business arise. There are stark clear edges of awareness and strange evasions. And I do not quite recognize thoughts as belonging to some thing called “me.” Rather, there is a strange newborn objectivity; ideas like messages in a bottle washed on the shore, traveling from beyond the horizon of an inner sea.
Will I reform my life, answer an ad on a matchbook cover, or plan a sea journey to find mermaids? It all seems possible.
I sometimes imagine that the first thing that happens when we die is that you are offered the opportunity to attend a 2-day seminar in which everything is explained. A sign up board advertises that you now can have all of your questions answered and learn the inner thoughts of God. Of course everyone wants to come. There is even a bit of jostling, until a weary looking angel explains that seating is unlimited. On the next day everyone is provided with a seminar folder and name tag. There is the usual series of handouts together with a legal pad and a pencil for taking notes. Everyone thinks, “they know how to do things up here.”
St. Peter takes the podium and clears his throat. He says that while everyone is getting settled there is going to be a bit of entertainment. He has the lights dimmed, asks for quiet and some music starts. People begin to relax, able to finally let go of the last throes of dying.
The slide show could be called perfectly ordinary, though for everyone it is a little different. There are images of a baby’s hand, of rain water sliding down the crevice of a leaf, a cloud, a spotted colt. And everyone feels like they see these things in a way they didn’t before.
A conviction begins to grow, which none of them could explain, that they really aren’t that interested in the answers they had come to hear. It all seems like God’s private business and since He is really good at doing things there is no point in going into details.
They could not tell you how it happens, but one by one the huge auditorium begins to empty. By the time the slide show begins to be accompanied by sounds, like red winged blackbirds and summer rain, half the seats are empty. When they bring in smells, like cinnamon and chili powder there are only a few knots of people here and there; and the ones that are staying are there mainly for the show: the smells, and the sounds and the tastes that appear in their mouths. The ones that leave find themselves obeying a powerful hunger to go out and look at the world. Somehow this seeing without distraction answers questions, but they cannot explain how it does. They no longer need to know how many persons there are in the Trinity or about Jesus’ miracles. They find what they were asking for (though it explains nothing) in spiral nebula, the smell of lilacs, and the cry of nighthawks.
I imagine what Aunt Jean would have seen in her version of the presentation is images of herself repairing, polishing, building, praying. She would then know down to the bottom of her heart that life never was about being smart, or reading important authors, being good enough, or doing the right things. She would realize all the ways she loved deeply, but had been too shy to notice. And like everyone else she would want to go out and see the world.
But being my Aunt Jean, she would know intuitively that St. Peter, in all of the thousands of years, had never gotten to give his talk. And she would wonder if maybe it wouldn’t be a kindness to give him the pleasure of saying it once. I picture their eyes meeting, the old saint and the new one. And they would go out together to look around a bit.
The face of the River is hidden in plain sight. The giant logs rest on the shore like fossil bones inviting you to dream of storms, of cataclysms, of places and times where human flesh has no place. On this shore, I feel like a child overhearing a conversation among grown-ups.
Many of us experience moments when it seems there is something more to the world than can be counted and measured; beyond the world of sense, beyond science, beyond everything we “know about.” Something looks back at us, something looks through us.
Those moments question you like Socrates, creating an awareness of things which up until then, you did not know you knew. -Sometimes what is created is clarity about what happened long ago. Sometimes you become aware of things you overlooked, happening now.
And sometimes there is a glimpse of a things which are not only delightful, but numinous; and these are strangest of all. It is like being transported back to the beginning of humankind, seeing in a way which led people long ago to invent gods and cosmic histories.
When a mountain rises above an alpine lake, creating a mysterious twin in the water below, the shimmering image leads you to look at the mountain, and then at the lake, and back, until you are not sure which is more real. The lake amplifies the remoteness of the mountain. But looking up from the lake, the mountain is not as solid as you thought. You are led to ask, ‘what does this mean?’
-But this is stranger still because rocks and water don’t have meanings; they are rocks and water. -How do certain places in time make you aware of what is hidden in your mind?
I don’t think anyone knows. Some places invite you into dark reveries where you may see only tangled threads, tragedies and broken things, but sometimes meanings are evoked which are beautiful and fugitive vanishing around a corner like a mysterious woman in a spy novel.
Which of the things intuited when you are gripped by wonder, delight or terror should you believe in?
Why not believe everything? It is not for me to say what God’s thoughts are like. I am too stupid for that. My task is to watch and learn.
What do I learn? I learn to be human. I think God is a street performer, showing up in unexpected places, performing wonders, then vanishing. This God says; ‘Where were you when the Leviathan was created? -You don’t know do you? Watch and learn.”
I came upon a tree uprooted by a storm and paused, moved but finding it difficult to say why. Perhaps my aging body shuddered at sudden change. -One morning the tree stood upright, greeting the sun. By mid afternoon a storm arrived, just like many others, but coming on with sudden violence. What had been endured and overcome many times on that day could not stand.
That morning there was an individual life, an “I.” The intricate network of roots, drove into the earth reaching out, grasping, hungry to build itself. And then the tree came down, no longer a life, but material to build other life.
As I stood looking at the downed tree roots, light coming through the forest canopy played along its reticulations, reminding me of flames. I stood, head bowed to Brother Death, whose sly smile was reflected in that net.
-Would he and I meet, later in the day? In the dappled light, “I,” this strange, seemingly irreducible me was a flicker in the burning world.
A manatee is a creature it would be hard to conjure in imagination if you never had seen one.
Perhaps we go to the zoo to be reminded of the untold possibilities that life affords. The Shang (ancient Chinese) kept exotic animals believing that they revealed hidden powers in the world.
Kept behind barriers, the zoo creatures are dreams which entertain and disquiet. Young boys jeer at the captives; reveling in their freedom and the creature’s confinement. They are unaware of how they too are destined for confinement: in office cubicles and suburban houses. Perhaps, subliminally, some have taken in the hidden despair of their mothers and fathers, and need to pretend there is no common fate.
Zoo goers miss the hopeful, disquieting, wonder which these creatures can convey because they do not take in the strangeness of their own form, nor the strange captivity in time which they endure.
The zoo animals look at us. We at them. Neither see the other. -If we did see them perhaps there would be no zoos, or of an entirely different kind. -Maybe there would be a homecoming, freeing some part of ourselves, which is “lost in thought.”