She was sitting in her wheel chair with tears in her eyes. She looked at me, kneeling next to her on the floor, I can’t remember what we had been talking about, but then she said, “some things that are very beautiful are also very painful.” I just put my hand on her knee and breathed with her. Continue reading “Propaganda, Meditation and the Conditioned Mind”
We were driving north from Ojai, summer 2013, hot as fuck high noon, van leaking coolant, just enough to annoy you. Hwy 101 north of Santa Maria, no mans land, and in the distance a shimmer. No way that is a human being on this road, right now. Shock. It is. Cars screaming by. Oh shit. Slow down, we have to pick him up, don’t stop though, too hot for the van. Open the sliding door, just let him fall in. Instinct takes over. Where’s the water, its all we got. Drink it all, I say. He does and passes out on the floor of the van. Will he die? Do we need to find a hospital? He comes around in a bit. We take him to King City. Get him some more water. Says he’s OK and can take it from here. I think you just saved my life, he said. I nodded, yes I think so too. Said thank you and before parting ways wanted to show us his back, it was covered, tattooed with angel’s wings.
In 1976, Ruth Denison took a trip to the high desert in Southern California. While camping near Pioneer Town, she rescued a family of baby opossums’ who were clinging to their mother who had ceased living. Compassionate to all creatures in suffering, Ruth had a very grounded view of right action and right thought. She did not stand for “bullshit” or sit with it for that matter. She was riding the waves of giants and she wanted for everyone to gain the capacity to see from this point of view.
Teetering on the edge of oblivion, the black mask of reality torn asunder. Memories return. Afterlife images, meaningless surrender.
I was not tired when I heard the word whispered in my ear that night. Grey and dreary, starlight reflections on the wet asphalt. Colorless. Apart somehow, unreal. They told me to go home, now.
So I did, listening to my footsteps echo on the empty street. Urban homesteads with stoops for faces. Cold, lonely. I’d dreamt this before, I thought, long ago. Like a million years by the dream clock. So much undone, so much recounted. What on earth did it all mean? Continue reading “David’s Sling”
There are those rare times in life that upon looking back, become something very special. The music scene in Ojai, Ca in 2009-2010 was one of those times. I didn’t know it then, but my good friend Brad Buley did. He came up to me the night after the first Seraphim Rising concert. We were hanging at Movinos downtown and he came up to me and he said, “you’ve changed everything, you know that.” I was like, “yeah, whatever” with a shrug and a smile and he was like, ” no really, you’ve changed it, you’ll see”.
It’s the running that kept me silent. All the dark places and the reasons for things I wish I didn’t know. There exists a need to dominate. The fear of uncertainty like the necessity of a challenge. There, creates the need to forget. I have been good at that until now. Narrow goals along lonesome highways propagated across my time. Convinced of needing more, I fought against my forgetting. A battle gaining strength in conflict. And for some reason, today I spoke and so I stopped running.
