Untinted awareness is the animator of my cartoon life. I don’t know where my thoughts come from or who is thinking them. The plants know enough to reach toward the life-giving sun while people hide inside the pale, stale fluorescence of offices, making plans which will mostly evaporate or capsize.
Life vibrates through the marrow of my gangling bones. Gravity rolls up through my finger-like toes, pushing exactly enough against my welterweight to make me vertical. Birds perch on the vast networks of wires and cables, four legged creatures climb all over the fences and trenches and perpendicular buildings, indifferent to their architecture, oblivious to their purpose.
I once spent most of a year hitch-hiking half way around the world to find adventure, unaware when abiding there, of the mysticism of the East, only to come home with a newborn thirst for the beauty in every movement. Peasants there, squatted in fields breaking rocks with more gracefulness than I’d ever seen.
We’re always jumping in cars and joining the jam, going wherever everyone’s going, running our complicated imaginations on fumes, the rumors of betterment. There’s always someone saying something could be better, while we willingly replace our skulls- carved over millennia of bending nature – with programmable mechanicals.
My ancestors, wearing animal skins or coarse-cut unstitched garments, built simple shelters with crude tools. Many improvements later we wear smooth fitted, refined things, manufactured in the identical millions; sky high in towers of metal and glass, we push buttons and fill out angry service requests. I wonder if, under those ancient roofs, within the creatures inside those coarser garments, there was any different refinedness of life energy. I wonder about my own power supply. I don’t need to be plugged into alternating current or lithium ion batteries to do a day’s work or a day’s damage. How does ‘I’ work? Is it different in any way from what powered our rougher hewn ancestors with their shorter list of coffee drink preferences.
I want to know if there’s any destination for improvement. There must be some infinite voltage powering this whole lit-up tapestry of life, a staggering energy bill funding the incalculable sum of needs for every article of flora and fauna and mineral; green grass and gasoline. Even the firefly is lit by something.
Is there such a thing as progress and, if so, is it being misappropriated, grafted onto the fabric of self-interest by ideologues predicting profits. The whole truth spreads itself evenly, patiently. Not by flaming speeches; but by light from a heart that never sleeps.
This morning I woke to a world that was entirely temporary. A dharma bum exhaled a sacred syllable over charcoal filtered cigarette smoke, illustrating his breath. A pious man in clown pajamas cracked yokes by the dozens, zealous over damnation, the devilry of eggs. He chanted ciphers about when exactly life begins, not realizing that his savior already told him: it doesn’t, and it doesn’t end either. The world’s longest running ad campaign is for youth and abundance. Privately, there’s an epidemic of fear over finales. As soon as I finish this espresso, I will amount to something unforeseen. But for whom?
The bartender last night asked “what’ll it be pal?”. I had to confess, I don’t know; most of us chew this life till long after it loses its flavor. But I had an old friend, a humble sage, Joe who drove a Wonder Bread truck by day and sang on the vaudeville circuit by night. He was a small but mighty tenor who could sing a door right off its hinges. Long before I met him, he had discovered an ecstasy in the very air, erupting in the silence of a gently drawn breath. He told me, someday you’ll be able to breathe that way whenever you want to. I’ve never recovered from his wisdom.
Once when the Berkeley hills were on fire, all those magnificent homes burning while I watched outside my garage woodshop in the lowlands, I called Joe because I didn’t know why I should be making cabinets and furniture when everything burns up like that. He talked me down to where making things is good, even if the hills are on fire. People will use them, maybe pass them on, value them.
More than 10 years ago my sister and I sat with our older brother as he came to the end of a 14 year battle with his cells. As he lay in silence, heaving widely spaced breaths, a nurse told us the time was near. Slightly later there was just a large empty package on a hospital bed, labeled with the unanswerable question: what happened to the life that had flowed through him up to that moment? I didn’t see it go. Being almost 3 years younger than him I hadn’t seen it arrive in the first place.
Plenty of people in this great senseless parade will tell you what you are. They just don’t know. Nobody knows. Last week I wrote these lines to a song in memory of my big brother:
Autumn came through without a sound
Where is the summer when leaves turn brown
Where do they go once they fall on the ground
How does one thing, turn to another
Where did life go, when it left my brother?
Once I was speechless, a helpless infant. Then the words began to pour into me from the bottomless pitcher of a human conversation hundreds of thousands of years old. Repeated injections of mankind’s favorite excruciating invention – purpose – seeped into my innocence, thoughts telecasting in perpetual motion. Every day and night the tale was told until I lay down exhausted and drifted into the silent relief of sleep.
When I was about nine I was cutting across a vacant lot, walking to school, probably late. From no place, for no reason, I had this feeling. Like I didn’t have to worry about myself. There was no sign posted but it could have been a shortcut to heaven.
Ecstasy and rumination are two uses of the same mind. Like Clark Kent and Superman, you’ll never see them together at the same party. If I could be quiet enough to hear the universe expanding, listen to nearby highways where rubber strokes the road like a horsehair bow on the cello’s catgut strings; still enough to feel the earth spinning, the tectonic plates bumping and grinding, – Where are the brakes on this vehicle! – If I could bear the stillness and withstand the quiet, where would be forever compared to that, a twenty megaton laughing gas blast from the present tense?
How long has being, been around? If I am nobody in particular, other than being, I’ve been here a long time. Without being, how was there anyone? I’m ancient. Much older than the first batch of the finest scotch. There’s a lot of mileage on the skin of my soul.
There are no authorities; No one can tell If your cave paintings are any good. They are painted by your life energy. If you can recognize them as masterpieces, you are independent, supported by respiration and circulation, which you don’t command but only receive.