The Sirens of the Unreal

We carry within us the echoes of past events. The complex weave of our memories interlaces with the moment in a hundred subtle ways. Small current events can brush against older events, causing the memories to rise up and inhabit the current moment, like ghostly judges, peering over our shoulders, sitting in judgment of the day and the events of the day.

It can be very difficult to shake those judges, with their opinions made of memory, out of the moment. We live in a world of illusion. The illusion is that past events somehow cause present events. The illusion is that the past somehow illuminates the present, somehow shapes the future.

Reality is that we are in a world where we, as independent beings, capable of thought and action, possess an incredible potential, limited only by the physics of the universe. The opinions made of memory are essentially meaningless in the present. Each moment is shaped by the thoughts and the actions that happen inside of that moment. Nothing more, nothing less.

Our thoughts and our actions inside the moment bring forth the occurrence of that moment from the vast and amorphous potential that is the universe, that is our life. It is an incredible thing, dazzling in its sheer simplicity. The past is an echo. The past is the opinion of memory. The past is illusion. The near limitless potential of our lives is born in the thoughts and actions of the moment.

If you can reach out a nd pull yourself into the moment, pull yourself away from the echoes of the past and the dreams of the future and the allure of the sirens of the unreal, then you will known the moment and knowing the moment you will know…everything you need to know.

Waking Into A Memory

I had an interesting experience last night.

I did not dream, but rather I woke in a specific set of memories. There wasn’t a dream associated with them, since often, I will dream of something and then wake thinking about the subject of the dream. Rather, I woke right inside the memories of 1981, when I was a student at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion.

I went to school there for about two years, worked a variety of part time jobs, lived in a couple of different places, and just generally have fond memories of the experience. The memory set was both the place (Vermillion is a nice little town, typical of small college towns in the Midwest) and the people (I went to school with a cluster of people that I had grown up with, as well as making new friends and acquaintances while I was there).

I lay awake in the darkness and just let my mind wander through those memories, most of which were very good (and nearly thirty years away). I grinned a lot, there in the darkness, as I remembered people and places and events.

I’m not sure why I woke in that memory set – it may be related to the twelve boxes, since there were definitely items form that time frame in the boxes, including a copy of my college transcripts. It’s possible that seeing those documents stirred up those deep memories. It is also possible that something else touched them and caused my subconscious to recall them. The thing that was the most interesting to me though was waking directly into the memory set, that was an unusual, but cool, experience.

Strip The Day of Its Clutter

Strip the day of its clutter
Clear away the dust and debris
The tiny broken pieces of other days
Sweep them up and consign them
To the bins of discarded memories
Set down the weighted burdens
Still carried though reason is lost
Then stop and close your eyes
Breathe deeply of the fresh air
Smell all the green scents of spring
Set aside that last chill of winter
All things are reborn here and now
That includes you and all your branches
Renewed, emboldened, let them turn
Let them turn toward the sun
Strip the day of its clutter

The Bath

He slips into the bath tub. The water is hot, very hot and slides over him. He closes his eyes and leans back against the porcelain. He feels the heat penetrating his body and feels the pain slipping away. It always astounds him how immersion in a tub full of hot water strips everything away and makes the world pure and clean.

The water smells faintly of iron. He lays there until the world is lost in the sensation of the bath. He rolls his head and hears the popping in his neck. He straightens his knee, the damaged one, feeling it stretch. His finger tips find the piece of metal embedded in his right hand, between the first two fingers, that he has never bothered to have removed. He traces the line of the scar where it went in. He remembers closing the wound with an improvised butterfly of utility tape. He feels the slow rise and fall of his chest.

He counts each breath until he loses count. He opens his eyes and notes on the wall the sweep of the sun and the passage of time. He considers it odd the memories that lie in the bathtub with him. He splashes his feet and wishes he had a little yellow duck. No bath is truly pure without one. But this bath is close enough. Most of his life close enough has been good enough and he has made his peace with that.

Sorceror (Fiction)

I was tired.

I was living on the watch.

I had slept three or four hours a night for the last run of days. I had lived in hotels and airports and airplanes. When I slept it was not the deep restful sleep of dreaming but rather the fitful sleep of exhaustion.

I was floating. I floated out of the airport. I floated down the highway in the rental car. I was closer to home than I had been in a long time. I pulled into the parking lot of St. Louise's hospital just after midnight.

The nurse at the desk patiently explained the whole concept of visiting hours to me. I used my Sorcerers tricks to persuade her to pretend the rules didn't exist for me. She would not make the decision alone and had to call her supervisor.

I pretended I was human long enough for them to decide I was human and I moved past the artificial barriers of bureaucracy and took the elevator to the third floor where she was in a recovery room.

We were lovers once and we ended badly in a tangle of betrayal, blame and anger. We found a fragile truce in the years that followed. I do not think we ever truly fall out of love. We change and they change and the world changes. Loves loses its significance in the scheme of things.

She was frail and nearly invisible in the sterile room. She was never a big woman - small, slender, and compact were all accurate descriptions of her. She was substantial. She was always "there". She had presence. In that white room she was only a shadow of what I remembered. Her hair was still lustrously dark, a thick braided rope of night. Her skin was still translucently porcelain. But it was porcelain laid carefully across a gaunt memory.

I picked up a chair and carried it across the room and set it near the bed. I kept my coat on, even though the room was warm. I had a gun on my belt and explanations in my wallet, but I preferred not to deal with the questions that always follow, so I kept the jacket on. The weight of the gun was the weight of the world and I think that it was that weight that bore down on us and pulled us apart.

Her right hand lay on the sheets. It was frail and bore the bruises from repeated I.V. lines, though there are none then. There were other lines and tubes that ran into her and through them moved fluids. I carefully picked her hand up and cradled it in mine. She was flesh and bone, but aren't we all?

Her eyes flickered open and I saw that bright robin's egg blue that stole my heart and tangled my soul. She is in her eyes and within her eyes she is still electric. A smile flickered on the corners of her mouth. I remembered the softness of her kisses, impossibly soft. I remembered the harshness of her words, where, in anger, she cut quick and deep. We are all of those parts of us, good and bad. They are the sum of us.

Her hand curled slightly in mine and she squeezed it a time or two and then let her hand lay still there. She could not talk. Tubes ran down her throat. She simply watched me and I remembered all the other times she watched me. I remembered when those eyes sparkled and I remembered when they flared.

She lifted her hand from mine and found the center of my chest. She tugged at the buttons of my shirt. I stood up near the bed and unzipped my jacket all the way and unbuttoned my shirt. She rested her hand on my abdomen and pulled at my t-shirt. She reached across her stomach and touched the bandage on her side - thick, heavy, taped in place, covering a tube from which drained…death perhaps.

I knew what she wanted. I pulled my t-shirt up. Her slender fingers flickered across my skin, cold and impossibly light. She traced the set of scars there.

I remembered the conversation from years ago.

We were sitting at the pool in the Monterey Marriott. She was under the umbrella, sheltered from the sun, sprawled in a black one piece bathing suit. I was fresh from the pool, sitting on the chaise next to her, toweling myself dry. She was watching me with those eyes. She sat up and reached out and laid her hand on my side, her fingers tracing that same set of scars.

"Did you ever notice that the smallest of the scars nearly killed you and the largest of the scars saved your life?" She paused. Her eyes peered into mine. "I wonder, when we are done, if we will be small scars or large scars."

She kissed me and stood up and took a few quick steps and dove into the pool before I could answer.

Years later, in a hospital in Morgan Hill, I put my hand over hers and trapped her hand between the warmth of my skin and the warmth of my hand. I leaned down close to the fragile shell of her ear and I answered the question she never asked all those years ago.

"You ripped my heart out and left the largest scar of all."

She smiled and closed her eyes and fell back asleep.

On Monsters

I was walking back from lunch yesterday talking with my friend Don about the noise water heaters and furnaces make and I had a memory that made me laugh.

When I was young (probably around five or six, maybe younger) we lived on Jackson Boulevard in Rapid City in a small house - three bedrooms, one bath, and a full basement. To enter the basement you went down a rather steep, straight, wooden staircase. I was in the basement on some errand or the other and as I was leaving the basement I flipped the light switch off and started up the wooden stairs.

The water heater came on - with a thump…thump…thump-thump-thump-thump.

It sounded exactly like someTHING running up the stairs behind me! I screamed and dashed upwards hands and feet scrambling. Once at the top of the stairs of course, I realized what the cause was (perhaps my parents or one of my siblings explained it in fits of laughter). I laughed today with the memory - and I can still recall that moment of sheer terror as I fled up the stairs, pursued by the monsters of my imagination.

Now, all these years later, I laugh about it. But, stop and think about it. Of all the childhood incidents and accidents, that one sticks out strongly in my mind as me being truly, blindly, terrified. Through the years that have passed I have been scared, I have known moments of terror, but that one is extremely vivid. I am not sure if I was ever truly that afraid again in my life and I think about that and realize that it was a pure form of terror - the pure terror of the imagination, which can conjure far greater monsters than the real monsters of this life.

The Strange Currents Of October

Fall is often an introspective time of year. I know I feel that way and I know that many of the people I talk with feel that way. There is something in the season - perhaps the eternal influence of the end of summer, perhaps some shift in body chemistry as we prepare for the coming winter, perhaps something cultural that is deeply ingrained.

Personally, on top of the introspection of fall, I layer a profound sense of loss on top of the month of October. October is a time frame in which I often find myself contemplating the loss and memory.

Principle among those losses was the death of my father and my grandfather separated by only a few short weeks in an October many years ago. My father died of cancer and my grandfather of a heart attack. My father was 54 and my grandfather was 84 (it was my mother's father, my father's father, my other grandfather, died when I was very young, at Christmas, also of a heart attack).

I could list other losses and incidents of loss that stacked up in the month of October, but I won't. Suffice it to say that it a time of contemplating life and death for me, both on the personal level and on the wider cultural level, with Halloween (All Souls Eve and All Saints Day).

That combination has some strange effects on me. First, it does make me emotionally sensitive to all kinds of loss. It means that sometimes, with little or no warning, with minimal triggers, I can easily spin into a deep and dark mood. At the same time a greater sensitivity to the fragility and eternity and beauty of life itself rises up in me.

It is a season of strange currents. It is a season of simplicity and beauty and grace and sadness and joy and memory. It is drawing to a close as we slip into the final week of October. I know from many years prior that I will rapidly slip out of October and slide into winter, which in California means rain and rain and a little more rain with some extra rain in case you weren't watching.

Winter is also a season of long slow rainy days spent curled up with a good book or watching a classic movie (or a new one). Winter is the season of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Winter is the season of driving to the Sierra Nevada's to see the snow. Winter is the season of going to the coast to watch the wild storms crashing into the shore. Winter is the season of a long mountain hike in rain drenched redwoods, where you reach the far point of the hike and realize you are soaking wet and have several miles to go to get back and wonder what the hell you were thinking? Winter is the season of a lazy weekend day spend sitting in a mirror staring at a painting for hours.

So, for all the strange currents of fall, for all the moods and memories of October, I love this time of year. It has a certain quiet hushed vibrancy, as if just under the currents it was thrumming with life. It seems at times I can hear the heartbeat of fall, soft, somber, and powerful. For all its moods, I love these strange currents.