The days are crisp and clear. The nights are full of stars and bone cold. The ground is frozen until after two o'clock. Some days it never thaws and remains a firm reminder under our feet. A contrast to the muddiness of a month ago.
Something comes in the night to carry our garbage, cans and all down a ravine near the house that flows into the huge, ancient, dry stream below our house. It flows for seventy-five miles, North to South, parallel to Pecos Canyon. Ancient fossils of strange yet familiar clams dot the rocks along its unknown shore.
This is the bed of the original sea, now eighty-five hundred feet above the oceans we know. Some of these rock clams look like two angels wings beautifully joined. Others resemble the clams I learned to dig and to relish in my days in New England. The mud stone they inhabit is green and brown. I wonder if that was the color of the vastness of the mudflat they lived in when the world was mostly ocean? I wonder if it smelled like low tide on the clam flats along the Bay of Fundy in the middle of summer?
I wonder if the land tide the moon created every day when it once was so close helped raise these enchanted mountains of sangre? I wonder if the volcanoes round about, once belching, who threw the globs of heavy, iron rich lava bombs I find everywhere in Nuevo Mexico del Norte let anything live anywhere near them. Did everything die here and there in the Volcano Zones? Was it so volcanized worldwide that life on the surface almost died out only to rise from the seas, the fungus among us, and the air while the moon plowed and plowed the mountains up out of oceans time and time again?
We keep coming back. We the life forms that persist and persist everywhere in the universe. Indeed, life is the most common thing in the wide universe. It is the very essence of existence. Life is the most abundant element everywhere. The spark of life, the energy that allows even the most fundamental chemical and elemental interaction to happen at all in order to become that which is life, is fueled by a desire to be living. That background sigh, that breath of all the cosmos is one with all we and the universe are. The original elemental concept sprung into being by the original elemental response is love, light; consciousness in adinfinetum. It has a beginning; the original moment and therefore, the beginning of consciousness, and it has an end; the moment energy completely expends itself and exinstance ceases to exist.
Michael
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Sunday, October 31, 2010
The Truth About Holidays
Happy Holy Eve. Today/tonight is the time to honor and remember our departed loved ones. We do this with hideously carved pumpkin heads that remind us of our past when we were head hunters in Europe and used to display the severed heads of our enemies around the house with candles lighting up their empty eye sockets, and with costumes of witches and devils so that we don't forget how scary we are supposed to believe the natural religion of our ancestors tonight is/was.
Today/tonight is another reminder that the last two thousand years of Christianity, and the false peace it expounds upon is just a speck in our long cultural history. The "Auldthing" guided us for a hundred thousand years and more and it's still running in the background of our memories. After this "civilization" falls and another "Dark Age" comes, the old beliefs will come back to guide the ones who come after us. Imagination has always given us the masks of gods, but that long, hundred thousand year tradition and experience of living gives us truth, and the collective human culture that fuels our intellectual reality. We have been dreaming and remembering for a very long time and handing down the lessons of life orally for a lot longer than we have known how to write about it.
About twenty-five thousand years ago something happened. We started recording the things we know so that we could remember beyond the span of a single human life. We started painting on cave walls, scratching cyphers on bone and shell, sculpting images of ideal women and animals in clay, building huge stone edifices, using symbols to represent tangibles, and eventually to develop writing styles to record our existence and to hand on our thoughts to those around us and for those to come after us. That something that sparked this long renaissance remains a mystery to us and has been speculated about for generations. We come closer and closer to understanding why or what caused us to start recording so suddenly after seeming so silent for so many thousands of years. Yet, I wonder if there isn't something we are leaving out in our quest for the understanding of the phenomena. I wonder if we really understand how ancient the fairy tales are with their goblins, ogres, kings, princesses, bakers, and spinners are? I wonder if we know that we are hearing the voices of the ancient ones from tens of thousands of years ago as they tell us our familiar bedtime stories about witches, gingerbread houses, dwarfs and princes? The symbols we have made up help us to remember when we can understand them, but we also remember individually deep inside our human souls. That deeper memory is much older than the symbolism of painting, sculpture, oral tradition, or writing. It has been with us far longer. That inner knowing has been with us ever since we first woke up and became human and apart from other animals.
The tales we are all told as children, and our mostly misunderstood holidays are the voices of thousands who have gone before us over thousands of years reaching out to us so that we may remember who we are and where we come from, but most importantly; how we survived these untold generations and how we may continue to survive, no matter what. Every pumpkin head glowing with inner candle light, every jolly fat man who comes in the winter to cheer us up with presents, every beautiful maiden who comes laden with flowers in the Spring, every harvest of thanks in the Fall, every part of the fabric of that inner core of humanness comes from those many almost forgotten voices who lived and dreamed and experienced life for a hundred thousand years before us to remind us of where we have been and what makes us homosapien.
We are the animals who record our thoughts and hand those thoughts down to generation upon generation of others of our kind, and one way we do that is through the ritual of holiday festivity. We remember the old ways by acting out in the ceremony of costume at Halloween, by bringing trees into our homes in the dead of winter and lighting them with candles or the modern equivalent during Christmas, by presenting prospective mates with candy hearts in the spring for Valentine's day, and countless other traditions all over the world of man. We do these things in order not to forget what it is that makes us human even though we may have forgotten why. It is what sets us apart from the other inhabitants of this planet. It keeps us in the mystery that we all know exists, but cannot really understand in its mysteriousness.
Science is searching for the answers to the mystery, but the mystery is so huge, so all encompassing, that the answer is elusive. The question itself is mysterious to the point of unanswerability. The "big"questions themselves are often forgotten in the mystery itself. We have so many questions and so many answers age upon age, that we sometimes forget everything around us and descend into periods of know nothingness, war, and ignorance. Yet even in those seeming dark periods, some of us remember in our bodies through the ritual of the Holy Day/Holiday even if our minds seem to have forgetten, and the collective wisdom of our ancestors is preserved and handed on to future generations. Sometimes, one of us stops and wonders why and we find deep comfort and edification directly from the hearts and minds of our ancient ancestors.
Happy Holidays,
Michael
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Love Letters of Old
I remember the love letters I wrote in my young man days. The ones that have survived are truly lovely. They sound clearly as a bell in the wind, of a young man in his prime, in heat, and in search of lasting love; a quest for the Grail that is rarely found. Still, the letters wax poetic with imagery of beauty as found in young ladies eyes, hair, bosoms, voice, and lips. The metaphors abound with and soar to the heavens with longing and promise and comparisons to the clear blue skies, the colors found in varieties of flowers, and rushing streams. All that survive, and the ones I can remember, hiding, no doubt, in several middle aged lady's hope chests, sound very much like the longing howl of a hound scented in to a bitch in heat. The letters use clever monkey words in combinations designed to elicit a favorable sexual response from the female in question, but make no mistake; the letters contain human male animal calls on a level we as a species have come to understand and to perfect; not much different really from the wild calls one hears in the Central American isthmus from howler monkeys and their ilk, with one possible exception perhaps. The letters contain another sort of call; one of union on a spiritual, emotional, and physical level.
As I have relearned through a small kitten my household rescued from a remote wood pile in these strange mountains of Northern New Mexico; all of us furry ones need love to survive. We need union with other furry ones. We cannot live without it. We need to be touched. We need to be held. We need to find that close warmth in another's arms, paws, or nuzzle. We need reassurance and encouragement. We need love. Plain and simple. If we cannot find love, or if we loose love somewhere down the line, we die or we continue breathing stunted, small, dark; only half alive.
Another male I know told me, “Men are the romantic ones. They write the love letters, they write the songs, they send the flowers; we're the romantic ones. Women aren't romantic or loving. They're ruthless and know just what they want, and it ain't us.” He also jokes about starting a class action suit representing all men throughout eternity against the transgressions of women through the ages. When he jokes with other men about it, they all laugh and agree to sign on to the suit. Deep inside all men have already signed on and secretly hope someone will really do such a thing. One only needs look at history to know women have used men to further their agendas for as long as there have been men and women. Remember Helen of Troy? Need I say more?
All men, whether they admit it or no, long to return to their mother's womb through whatever vagina is available at any time. No time like the present is our collective motto, even if we don't know it. We want that feeling again; that slippery slide through the passage, but this time, we want to go into a warm place, protected by our mother's thin belly skin. We don't want to be spat out into a glaring, loud, cold place with too many hard surfaces. We want soft. We don't want to worry anymore. We want to be safe, secure, warm, and to float along in warm juices being fed automatically, whenever we need feeding. We want to hear the world through that drum of mother skin and sleep when we feel like it. It'd be nice if we could slide out once in a while, have sex with our hostess and get so deep inside her that we disappear again into that warm wet retreat. Maybe we could hide out in the womb for a few decades to emerge into a better world. Maybe we could go back in time in the womb to a “better” place. Maybe the womb is a time portal. Who knows? All we men know is that, if we could just fool around with the vagina enough;get inside it, ejaculate into it, put our fingers in it, lick it, and smell it enough, we might figure it out and find the way back to paradise. Women aren't much help unfortunately. They have different agendas none of us males really understand.
There is that other thing though; we long, like any other furry creature, to be in union with others of our kind. We want to love and to be loved in return. We want to appreciate and to be appreciated. We want to grow old in familiar surroundings and with someone familiar. Sure, we all die alone, but before that time comes, we want to belong. We want to be treated with kindness and familiarity, and we want to treat others with kindness and familiarity. We don't want rough surprises. We don't want to be eaten in the night by hairy monsters, and we'd like to protect others of our kind, preferably female, from being eaten by hairy monsters in the dark. We feel good about protecting and providing, and it helps us not to be afraid. Yes, we do these things so that our unions with others may be lasting and we live in fear in the Western World that impermanence will take our happy unions away from us. It will, and it does; constantly. Impermanence is the only constant in life. Once we learn this, we learn to live in peace and understanding. Knowing that nothing is permanent allows us not to be taken by surprise when change takes place. Change becomes an expected guest rather than a nasty intruder. We can invite change into our understanding of life and live in peace with it, loose the fear, and have a shot of obtaining joy. We still howl occasionally, but less and less so as age dims us and teaches us to listen.
The energy of the metaphors of youth turn from lusting for that warm, dark, furry, wet place to a vision that becomes longer and broader with age. We remember still, but the pain of unatainment lessens as time passes. We learn to accept, and therefore, to cope with the uncertainties of life because we know finally that life is uncertain and filled with change. That's the fun of it really. How we deal with change progresses from fear to understanding and creative challenge. We learn to live within our means, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and sexually. And then of course; we die, hopefully in the peace of understanding, not in regret or misunderstanding. We, as men, start to focus more on other things besides the passage back into the womb, and find how big the universe really is. We slowly learn how to enjoy life, or at least how not to fear it, and the journey becomes easier and easier.
Some of us are slower than others, but none of us truly forgets the quest for the vaginal grail. We still want it in our senses and in our hearts, and in our dreams especially, but the field has narrowed and the plumbing becomes less and less reliable as time goes by. I don't remember being attracted to my Grandmother sexually as a young buck, but all the “girls” my age now look like my Grandmother did back in the day. Having sexual relations with someone who looks like my Grandmother is something I don't find attractive. I'm sure women feel the same about us. Finding the beauty and the sexiness inside a person is the key. Loving someone for who they truly are, rather than for a good breeding partner is tantamount for peace, joy, love, and understanding in our older years. Finding real love is only possible when we drop the egotistical yearnings of youth and give in to wisdom. When we learn to truly trust our gut while still listening to our heart, our perfect mate will be there in front of us. She was there all along.
Michael
Monday, October 11, 2010
The Old Man
Old people have their memories. I guess that makes me old. I have memories of memories. I'm making memories of course, but still.
I used to pick up an old man in the wilds of Maine on my way to work in Calais every day for a two year period. He'd be in the same place in the woods early every morning with his thumb stuck out, waiting for fate to come by and give him a ride to see his sweety in St. Andrews, NB. He was there in rain, snow, sun, fog and ice, in the darkness of Winter and the dim light of morning in Spring. I picked him up almost every day there for those two years. He was 86 when I first met him, and 88 the last time I saw him. Some said he died in the cabin he was born in back in the woods on the old farmstead. I learned what became of him after not seeing him for a few months.
I used to pick up an old man in the wilds of Maine on my way to work in Calais every day for a two year period. He'd be in the same place in the woods early every morning with his thumb stuck out, waiting for fate to come by and give him a ride to see his sweety in St. Andrews, NB. He was there in rain, snow, sun, fog and ice, in the darkness of Winter and the dim light of morning in Spring. I picked him up almost every day there for those two years. He was 86 when I first met him, and 88 the last time I saw him. Some said he died in the cabin he was born in back in the woods on the old farmstead. I learned what became of him after not seeing him for a few months.
The local Sheriff came by my place one evening with a picture of me. "Is this a picture of you?" "You know it is Johnny. Where'd you find it?" It was on old man Coggin's bedstead when we found him yesterday. He'd been dead a month or more. He was just layin' there, frozen like he was asleep. This is all we found. Did you know him?" The moment started etching itself in my memories to carry with me all these days, "I can't say I actually knew him." "Well, why did he have your picture on his bedstead?" I really didn't know, "I gave him a ride to the border crossing station every day for a couple of years so he could cross and visit his sweetheart. One day he asked me if he could take a picture of me. I guess this is it. That's all I know Johnny." He started to turn to walk off my front porch with an, "Alright then."
But that wasn't all I knew. The old man, whose name I never really knew until the Sheriff told me he was "Old Man Coggins," told me that when he was still driving, before the State took his license away, he tried to never use his brakes because it wasted gas. It took me awhile to figure that one out, but I still remember. He'd laugh at my life questions with, "Yer still shittin' yellow ain't you boy? Gorry!" He told me to enjoy the years of youth because old age lasts forever. And he told me with a laugh that his neighbor, an old spinster used to boil his socks for him while she was still alive, and that one evening he came into her kitchen while she was boiling socks and thought it was soup and drank a bowl full of the brew, "It weren't bad neither!"
Just before he died, he was admitted to my "ward" in the Calais Regional Medical Center, known locally as "The Butcher Shop." My charge nurse asked me to go in and clean him up some. I remember still the dirt caked behind his ears. When I asked him his name he told me it was 'Enry 'Iggins. After that, every time I treated him I teased him about 'Is name and sang what ever ditty I could remember about 'Enry 'Iggins to the tune of "I'm Henry the Eighth I am I am," and whatever. The director of nursing called me into her office one afternoon and asked me why I was "pestering" Mr. Coggins by singing to him, bringing up physical therapy equipment to get him out of bed, and washing my hands before and after taking care of him. I thought she was pulling my leg. I was like, "Well, he's had a CVA and that is how we treated our CVA patients back in Cambridge at Harvard Med, Mt Auburn. We had great success in our treatments. Mr. Coggins is never removed from his bed and is getting bed sores. I don't want him to become infected, which is why I wash my hands before and after treating him, etc. She looked me in the eye and said, "Leave Mr. Coggins alone. He's had a "shock" and is going to die."
After that I was the one who had had a shock and soon resigned to do full time farming and self unemployment, Maine style. I soon saw the Old Man by the side of the road while traveling to my new job as Architectural Illustrator for the Calais Redevelopment Center. He never spoke of his hospital experience and I never asked him about it. Now, I just remember the snow as it billowed around him in the dim light of January on the side of the road in Princeton as he stood waiting for me with his thumb stuck out waiting for me, like an angel with messages for me from Heaven.
Michael
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