Rambles and Gambles

2009-05-24T01:05:00.000-07:00

I said, "This is my heart?"

God said, "This is your heart, and it is the vastest thing in existence."

-Ruzbihan Baqli, 12th Century Sufi Mystic

dreams

2009-02-05T13:46:00.000-08:00

There is a sort of dream that you look forward to, that rears its head from time to time when things seem to be at their most dire. Most dreams are just fragments anyway, scattered pieces of the good times and the bad times, of people long gone and people still here. A few laughs in a humid, scrubby Florida backyard, fueled by tequila and the fuzzy glow of christmas lights. Happiness seems to flow by like a fat muddy river on a lazy saturday. Sometimes it is the fear that stalks you, and you wake on the floor of your attic room uneasy, grabbing for the switch on the lamp beside you, your heart pounding. Sometimes dreams leave you floating through the day scratching your head over an existential paradox, the underpinnings of which you can't seem to recollect. Once in a dream you perished in an airplane crash, and thoughts of your own morality followed you for months.

But there is this one dream, and sometimes you feel as though you only have it when half awake, when you are really by all accounts the maker of your own destiny- but it still feels like a dream. You are walking down the seawall in Pensacola Bay, the sky is dark blue fading into a sort of violet haze, and you come to the end. The water is choppy, slapping both sides of the narrow wall, shaking you. You look toward the sea, and you see the monster rising, moving slow and powerful above the rest of the waves, swallowing them in its wake. It moves over the causeway like a stormcloud, and faces you down like the sort of giant you heard about only in the worst bedtime stories. As it hits you, breaking your body, you lose yourself in the moment, you know that this is what you most need, that your spirit or soul or whatever else is left after your body is gone is finally going home, home to that place between the waves, that place the Chilean poet spoke of, the one place you will feel free.

love and mercy thats what you need tonight

2009-01-26T23:43:00.000-08:00

Everything exists in flashes these days. Feelings and moments, long gone, pass before me like fish in a tank. Sometimes at night, listening to the wrong song at the wrong moment, I find myself deep in the grips of nostalgia. I have to turn all of my pictures over. It does me no good to remember the good times, or to remember the times that I regret. Although, as I get older, my regrets seem to fade into the background. They are still there, but with the passage of time you realize that there is nothing you can do to change the past, and that there is no money in dwelling on things that you have no power to change.

I have no idea what it is that keeps me awake at night. The problem is that everything is so formless in my mind. Mostly when people are dealing with something, it is concrete. There was the girl that got away, the friendship that was broken, the traumatic incident that you can’t seem to shake. Like most people, I have experienced all of that, but none of it sticks in my mind as something worth being worked up over any longer. There is no one person in my past that I regret not being with today, and while I wish some friendships hadn’t been broken, you have to go on believing that people will come back to you when they will, or else they wont, and in the long run it doesn’t matter anyway. If anything, what bothers me the most is just the solid accumulation over the years of missed opportunities, opportunities for growth and for meaningful experiences that I let slip through my fingers. It is like there is this vision in my head of what life could be, and since the reality constantly falls short of that vision, I despair. Although that may be too strong of a word.

Maybe I just need to accept my melancholia as the primary symptom of who I am. You have to think you are this way or that way for a reason. Those of us who believe in God think that there is a purpose for our life beyond procreation, beyond the biological imperative. We may be foolish to believe that, but it gives us hope for something more meaningful than simply toiling day in and day out until finally we are in the dirt and forgotten. So who I am is a gift, in a sense, that allows me to bring to others something that they may lack. And in turn they offer me something that I lack, and so on and so forth. The funny part is that usually I am fairly happy, or at least content. Life is interesting enough most of the time, and there are a lot of good times and opportunities for growth. I know this note is unusually direct, but it is that sort of night.

Anyway, I am sorry that I have been so withdrawn from the world around me the past year or so. I know, and have known for a long time, that the only important thing I can do in this life is to give to those around me, and I haven’t been very intentional in that area lately. I haven’t been a good friend to a lot of people, and there have been countless ways that I could have reached out to people, even strangers, and I have passed them by. I am not by any means promising to wake up tomorrow and pull an Ebeneezer Scrooge, but perhaps I can start down that road. I am not worried about timing. This is a journey, and it will unfold at its own speed.

recent reflections

2008-11-23T21:52:00.000-08:00

When you are haunted you feel ill at ease, and nothing seems to ring the right bell. You are always aware of what is at your back, what has passed on, what should be gone from your mind. What follows you, follows you through the dimly lit alleyways of the everyday, through the murky corridors of human connection, is not a ghost. It is instead the overwhelming sense of not having lived your life the best way, of not giving your full measure of humility, of honesty, of love.

These past few years have haunted me. In earlier years I lived for the sublime, taking moments and collecting them in my mind and heart like photographs in an album. I lived for those highlights, but I also took an old man’s advice and tried to live always in the glow-lights, in the moments that veer away from the sublime and into the mundane, that may not capture the luminous quality of a sunset but instead give off the glow of a full moon on a night when it is most needed. In recent years I have not lived in anything, for anything. There is no real effort in anything I do, and when I fight it is for ground not worth standing on in the first place.

I am at this moment in a hotel suite overlooking the Cape Fear River. Several miles from here is a place where many years ago men built a large seawall to protect their military interests, and if you stand on that wall at high tide you may well be washed into the surging sea. The waves hit the wall, one after another, surging over it and into a multitude of barnacle-covered boulders only to fly backwards into the sea again. And so it goes. The sea gives, and then it takes away. It is like anything else in this life.

The waves in my life, waves that carry in their foam all that I have wanted in this life, needed in this life, they continue to crash into whatever strength is left in me. I can’t be sure but I feel that soon the time will come when those waves will have to return to the place they came from, and I will have to learn again how to give, to love, to no longer care about what I need but provide instead for the needs of others. My namesake, Saint Francis, is famous for having prayed, “Let me not seek to be understood but to understand,” and if I should truly need anything in this time, in this place I have found myself in, it is to make this prayer my own once again.

Perhaps in doing so I will find myself in another Franciscan story, as the barren tree that the little Saint implored to speak to him of God, which then bloomed large and colorful in the midst of the grey, haunted winter, perhaps I will find myself to be something growing and alive once again.

2 Posts from the Not so Distant Past

2008-10-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

August 3rd

In the end, this summer will not stand as one of the better seasons in my life. Situations have gone awry, trusts have been broken, and the days often dissolve into a sort of grey, seamless patchwork. The baser parts of myself have been interfering with my metaphysical goals. The harsh side of love is that it often involves not being loved in turn; that it requires giving with the full knowledge that nothing will be received. It is hard sometimes to feel unappreciated and alone, but it is far worse to let circumstances cause you to withhold your own love and care for others. Love has to be a one-way street before it can become anything else.

Today I drove out to Indian Creek and put my swim-trunks on, locked my truck and walked down the pathway to the water. I absentmindedly took some photographs of the water and wished for some matches. The creek always seems a fitting place for any sort of reflection- after all it was in those waters that I made my first half-hearted attempt at better understanding myself, of living more mindfully in the world around me, of touching whatever rhythms exist beneath the rattle and shake of everyday living. I stepped into the frigid water, felt it wind around my ankles like a blanket. I thought of Rumi: "There’s no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence." I looked toward a cabin up on the hill that I had helped build, years ago. I tried skipping some stones but never made it past five jumps. Mostly I stood there in the creek, admiring the moving water and the sun’s valiant attempts to break through the dense canopy overhead.

"You need to return to certain places to see things as they are," I imagined the trees saying. I realized again that this is all a circle, some sort of cosmic raga tying us all together and tearing us apart again. What comes to you must go away- what goes away will someday return, though perhaps in another, unexpected form.

There was something alive in the air as I toweled off with my shirt and gathered my things. Looking back, I almost imagined I had left my sorrows somewhere behind me, lost in the turgid waters of the creek.

September 20th

The first winds of autumn are finally blowing in to settle our nerves and give us room to breathe. The last days of summer are thick and remorseless, and its hard to feel good about anything in their midst. This summer it was hard to feel good anyway, but that is all behind me now- or at least it’s all hundreds of miles away.

I am enjoying myself for the first time in a long time. I left my friends house tonight, took in the stars in the clear black sky, put on some Van Morrison in the truck and took the long way home. There are good people around if you know where to look. Sometimes I don’t believe it, but I have to keep repeating it like a mantra till it sticks.

These early fall winds, the last gasps of the summer just at their heels, feel charged with possibility, with the feeling that anything can happen. For once that doesn’t strike me as ominous- and for that, if nothing else, I am hopeful.

dreams, dreams to remember

2008-06-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

Here in exile we wait for the news, any sort of news. There are a certain few of us who know full well the implications of abandonment; indeed we have come to expect it as our lot in life. For some this smacks of the earth shattering, but for those of us with shit to do it is merely background noise. It would be useless to pretend that anything surprises anymore. The unholy act of putting words to paper necessitates a sort of amused detachment, a way of saying to hell with it without sacrificing an inch. All we have to lose is self-respect.

I have dreams to remember too, but they aren’t the kind you sing about. Like Rimbaud I have grown sick of the world around me. It may be high time to light out for some distant backwater in hopes that the natives will be friendly, but somewhere in the back of my head it feels like a sort of betrayal. What hangs in the balance are the things that lie unsaid, that can never be said. I am only sick because I made myself that way. Not being honest with yourself is like sticking a finger down your throat, like throwing sand against the wind and expecting it to end up somewhere besides your own face.

Stranded

2008-05-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

It has been raining and spring is starting to roll in like a thundercloud. It obscures everything I do. Just when the molasses is thickest, the sun comes out. It’s just as well. I’ll be swimming in the river soon enough, and already I feel that it will be a sort of awakening. I’ll shed my skin in the green water just as surely as any snake. It’s calling to me like a dinner bell, and I might just be hungry enough to answer it the right way this time around. I look at the people that have been popping up lately and something tells me I ought to recognize all of this from something I may have seen before, or dreamed maybe.

But if life has taught me anything, it’s that everything is unpredictable except maybe the moon and the tides. Maybe even right and wrong aren’t so clear sometimes. I might just be in a place for a while where confusion is queen, where the unstruck note is the most important part of the whole orchestrated piece. I am planning on being okay with this, but I don’t expect anyone to follow me.

I put on my moccasins earlier tonight and went out for a while. The air still has a chill to it but there is an electric urgency to it as well. The spring always comes when it is most needed, like a storm traveling thousands of miles just to water some poor dirt farmer’s crops. I have been in the wrong place for far too long, and I am not speaking of geography. I think I will choose to see these April showers as a sort of benediction, gently urging me on my way to some distant place, some place that I have seen before but never quite reached.

bye bye blackbird

2007-11-27T16:35:00.000-08:00

Winter is here but the leaves still lie in clumps in front of my house like the death throes of autumn. I have lost so much these past few months but it has only served to bring clarity to my eyes and perhaps a slight tremble to my fingers. Everything I know has been marked by dread and the uncertain joy of a degenerate gambler throwing everything he has into the pot. I have thus far succeeded in keeping my head above water, as they say. What immunity I have found is not a result of virtue, but rather a keen sense of disinterest. All the rats left this ship a long time ago. These are the birth pains of a brand new day. We are but dust, and once you have died it will matter little whether or not you made your mark on the world or not. If we are going to live, let’s live for our neighbors and for beauty, for creation, for art, for anything that is not destructive. Life fully lived is a balance struck between intolerable beauty and immense pain. It is flowers on the one side and ashes on the other, and it all ends in tears.

"a dream may be the highest point of a life"

2007-07-02T01:59:00.000-07:00

Here in the backwaters, all we do is sit and hold out hope for rain. We are always drinking whiskey out of plastic cups and looking for nature to even the score somehow.
I have found that you can never build on anything in this life; the sands are always shifting beneath our tenuous bedrocks of hope. The moon continues to haunt us through the night, long after we close our eyes and try to sleep. It seems like everything is marked only by loss, and in the end it is the only constant thing we know. I have a great suspicion that in the end, all of our dreams will be as imaginary as the band around the equator.

When the sun falls from the sky all I know is emptiness and disappointment. There a thousand bad tastes in my mouth every time I even start to think about the overwhelming sense of loss that permeates anything good that seems to have happened in this world. It’s not depressing, not the end of the world, just simply the way things rest at the close of the day.

I was riding my bicycle along the beach the other night, with the full moon shining over the Atlantic and following me like an arrow across the water. Right now I just want to be anywhere but where I am. If I could hide from God right now, if I could stop believing that there is something that can transcend all of this loss, then I would take the last train to nowhere faster than you could sell me the ticket. Facing the darkened sea that night I realized it looked like anywhere in the world but where I was, and that feeling sort of hit me just right.

God has us all, from the skeptic to the zealot, from the mystics and fools to the capitalists in their steel towers. In fact he is in all of them, bringing them closer in that unity to the pacific fury of the Eucharist. God is a dying leper in India as surely as he is anything else. I want to forget all of this loss, all of this emptiness, and just be content with the million unrequited loves that slowly paint the masterpiece that is my broken and uneven relationship with the world around me.

the winds of community and the myriad ways in which they blow

2007-05-31T21:16:00.000-07:00

Summer is hardly here and already our flowers have wilted and died. The promises of spring have faded into memory, and we are left here in the same desert places that we knew in the first place. I suppose I was sinful in my hopefulness. It may well stand true that it is, in the end, too much to expect anything of anyone; I don’t really know. I have come to a place where my peace is no longer dependant on these things. The days pass like anything else, the nights seem to grow longer and longer, and I am just floating through all of this much like the ghost I have always tried to be.

Though the evidence seems to suggest that I am less dead than before; I am learning to embrace the dark moments as easily as I drink in the lighter ones. It is all becoming part of the same unbroken line. Perhaps this all means that the ghost has been put to rest, that my passage has been arrested for a time and I can just exist in peace with whatever God sees fit to send my way. I am still hurt by the indifference of others, I still grieve over the losses we have been experiencing, and I am still unsure about what any of it means; but somehow I can see that our deaths do not define us in a negative way, but only exist in order to deepen our compassion, to teach us how to love and be loved in spite of everything.

Outside these barren walls that we have constructed, here in this desert place, may we find what life remains and celebrate it. May we come from our distant solitary sojourns and meet at the table that will always wait for us, well-laid and vibrant with the fullness of what we most need.

Some Parting Words

2007-02-13T23:51:00.000-08:00

It is the anger that is most surprising. We are a society of large reactions, and if our current state was a ping-pong match and not a social philosophy, we might be doing rather well at the moment. But as it stands things aren’t as peachy as they might be. I know I don’t match up so well and in the future I am going to learn to keep my mouth shut. We have become very adept at fitting into the whole thing but I fear I have become a lost cause. Oh well. Nous habite mais mourir, and more power to it. Everyone wants to bend everyone else to their vision, to make everyone see things the way they see them. I know very few people personally who do not feel this way. I myself have been this way at times.

It is the disease of our days, and it breeds hopelessness. There doesn’t seem to be a line that can be drawn, and for all the line-drawers out there it makes things seem mighty desperate. I don’t even know what compassion means to people anymore. I wish to meet people who live like birds and laugh like fools; but I fear they have gone the way of the buffalo. These are strange times, and I hope to move on to something else before the winter runs its full course.

Draw away from your tyrannies, friends, and embrace your enemies. Try to love someone before it is too late. Let’s not figure things out like a computer, but instead let us leave the ninety-nine behind to search for the one. I don’t wish to speak on this much more in the future, because I have said all I know to say. I am hopeful for the future in spite of everything, but the indictment stands: we live in the age of the cynic, and we’d sooner spend our time counting flowers than smelling them.