The Color of Winter II: Fade Out

Holidays are hard for me, typically. At my worst, the few years before this last one, I slid into hopelessness at the beginning of October and didn't crawl out again until April. This last year, I struggled some, to make social plans, but much of the rest of my life was unscathed. The hardest period was nothing compared to that black six months of years past, and it only lasted a couple of weeks around Christmas. But the holidays still wore at me. The weather wore at me. I was terrified to cycle in the snow and cold. And the prospect of moving, repeatedly yanked away from me, that wore at me most of all.

I managed a few great things over the winter. I applied for a job. The first time in six years of disability. I added two more dance nights, so that I was taking west African dance classes four times a week. I added another night of volunteering at the bike workshop, and I began to join the other volunteers in community activist projects. And I beat that snow and ice terror and got to cycling through the worst of the weather, feeling deeply empowered for having done so.

But with everything that wore at me, my social tendency suffered, confidence waned, direction became muddled. Trust in the universe and the sense that my path was open, beautiful and attainable, and the compassion that came with that sense, began to fade. I was still doing all the big things I'd cultivated over the last year, but all the small things I'd been doing to make it all flow smoothly were left unattended, and began to wither. And the scold of the raven, the roar of the bear--days passed, then weeks, where they would to fail to reach me at all. I wasn't in a nosedive, but my climb upward had become a precarious hang in space without my feet rooted in reality.

The Color of Winter I: On the Road.

Over the course of last spring, summer and fall, I'd found, after years of faltering, a steady rhythm for my life. I found it by focusing on what I would do instead of what I wanted things to be, and by fostering trust in the path the universe had in front of me, instead of the dread and worry over whether or not I'd managed to cover all my bases. The patterns led me from one thing to the next, not through the fixation on long term goals, but by taking that which most enlivened me that was suddenly close enough at hand to be reached one step ahead of where I was already standing. And trusting as I was learning to do, every step, there was another deeply rewarding goal another step along. The sense that life is a journey was vivid and visceral.

So, after a progression of wonderful steps, I was offered a chance for my first trip out of Santa Fe in several years. I helped me friend, D, move his belongings from Santa Fe to Seattle. We cleaned, refurbished and then packed up the house, and drove the truck cross country. Over the course of the last several years, time away from home became unbearable. But the offer felt like the next step I hadn't realized I wanted, one pace beyond where I stood, so I took the opportunity. The trip was enlivening beyond description. I danced and felt my joy in that rekindled; I met with friends who I hadn't seen in 7 years, and some I hadn't seen in 20.

And while there, D dropped a bomb in my lap—he offered to rent me a room in his house there. I was being offered a chance to move. Anyone who's talked with me at length these last 8 years or so knows how often I've spoken of moving. I've never felt quite at home here. Just the offer was enough to kick my overplanning impulse into high gear. So I was knocked off kilter when the offer had to be rescinded. Shortly after, my roommate here in town offered to move my things up to Seattle when he moved back to Portland this summer. And shortly after that, THAT offer had to be rescinded. The entire issue of whether or not to move is a separate post by itself, so I won't get into that any more here, but I spent a large portion of my winter stumbling around due to the roller coaster the prospect turned out to be.

A Truth, a Pact, and the Dawn

When I was 20 years old, my father recommended to me that I go to listen to an old shaman from the Picuris Pueblo talk about manhood. But first he demanded I promise I would not leave before the talk was over. I was annoyed but finally I relented and promised to stay. I'm glad he made me promise.

Beautiful Painted Arrow (Tslew-teh-koyeh), Joseph Rael spoke like a lunatic. Nothing that came from his mouth made a damn ounce of sense. With no preamble he launched into one incomprehensible concept after another. He spoke of the sound a wall makes when your hand brushes over it. He spoke of a seed falling into the soil. He spoke of running into a post as hard as you could with your face and knocking out your teeth. And every time you started to contextualize what he was talking about--not make sense of it, not understand it, just start to feel familiar with the constellation of images he was using in a given instant, he'd drop that topic entirely and launch into a different concept entirely unrelated and just as incomprehensible.

People began to get up and leave. By the end of the talk there were fewer than 1/5 of us left in the room. I wanted to leave myself, but I'd promised to stay. My head felt like it was going to split open, it was throbbing so painfully. Trying to wrap my brain around his talk was giving me the worst headache I'd ever had.

The talk ended without resolution. He just...stopped. I shook my head. I remember being too disoriented to be properly angry, but that's the direction was going: anger. I stumbled out of the room, grabbed stuff off the table on my way out. I met up with my father.

He beamed at me like someone enjoying a joke at my expense. Or...no, more like someone who was trying to share an initiatory experience with someone else who'd been through it. Trying to wink to someone else who understood. The fact that I didn't understand made me angrier.

"So?" he asked conspiratorially. "How was it?"

"I have NO idea, Dad. It made no sense!"

"No? What did he say?"

"That's just it! I don't KNOW! It was...it was gibberish!"

"Why? What sort of things did he talk about?"

"DAD! I. DON'T. KNOW. He went on and on about stuff that made no sense."

"...like what?"

"Shit, Dad. It was...well, he said..." And BOOM. I opened my mouth and I vomited up a beautiful, succinct encapsulation of the theme, the message BEHIND what he'd said. Everything he'd said all of a sudden fell into a beautiful, small, perfect little message. And it wasn't a message I even realized I'd heard. It just...got into me. And as soon as it left my lips, I was dumbstruck. My eyes shot open, my jaw hung slack. My father nodded and grinned even wider. "Uh huh. See?"

The message was one of the most sublime understandings I've had in my life. It's still with me. I can no longer put it into words, but it's still there. And in the hardest parts of my life, it's been there to get me through.

That afternoon, I went back to my room and fell ill. I threw up literally a few times, ran a fever. The shock was way too much. Once I came down off that shock, I finally looked at the papers I'd picked up on the way out of the talk. One was a sign up for an initiation into manhood Rael was offering on the 5th, 6th and 7th of March. The 8th of March was my 21st birthday. I felt like a plucked guitar string. I knew I had to go, so I did.

The first day of the ceremony, his talks pushed me towards more illness, but less so. The second day was a moderate struggle. By the third day, everything he said hit me instantly and easily. I felt like one bad-ass zen mofo. I carried that zen feeling for a year. You could not shake me that year.

That 21st birthday, there was a full moon. And it was the closet lunar perigee in something like 75 years, if I recall correctly now. I recall feeling very connected to everything, and looking up and thinking how BIG the moon looked. But more than big, it felt present. Like it was the eye of the universe, looking back down on me with attentive care. I looked up and it looked down and I felt intensely bonded with it.

That bond hasn't left me, even after the zen feeling of oneness has drifted off some, the bond with the moon is still immediate. I felt like we made a pact that day and even now, that covenant is strong.

The holiday season is hard for me. I don't like our modern notions of community or what constitutes a "community" holiday. I don't like what our holidays say about us. And struggling with depression, I've had trouble connecting with people at all as the holidays roll around, leaving me isolated at the worst times to be isolated. I've managed what feels to me like a very successful, very active year, but the holiday's still knocking me around.

But this solstice, there was the full moon again, and this time, a total lunar eclipse, leave the moon's umbra a red ember in the sky. I lay out in the cold and watched the whole thing. I had a nice long conversation with the moon, and felt like the covenant was renewed. Most of that is too private and too intense to share. But I woke up the next morning feeling as if the entire difficult season was largely behind me. The season marks the death of the old, the Saturnalia, and the birth of the new, the glorious child (to continue in the Roman ethos, the birth of Zeus). I felt reborn the next day. I'm ready for the rest of winter and the coming spring.

On the Solstice, and the full moon, and the eclipse

The dying fire that is the opal of her eye is shaded from the sun by shadow of our silhouette, so that for this instant, in this midday that is our night, she can see us clearly.

Published 12 years ago, and written maybe 14 years ago

Cadence

The breath of light that holds our bodies at bay
pales and flares, drumming the hollows
like twelve hours of seawater, a liquid prism
held between two silver slivers of glass.
I ride a reaching tide, your trigonometry;
it rams cell into cell amid the rich silt
that swims in the basin of my brain like sparks
shouting, "Live!" across a childless ocean.

But then this slim caesura breaks.

The circling Earth buoys you up
and bears you away, where far to the south
another beach awaits your advance.
Abandoned to this empty expanse, damp,
salt-kissed, I ache in the smothering mist
to be again pinned to your naked, unbreachable
breast, where I know from the hum of your heart
that I am alive.

Published 13 years ago. Written perhaps 15 years ago.

Tide

The cleft that is the breath's brief span is spent;
the soft enfolding moment's music dies.
The cord drawn taut from mouth to ear is rent,
and you have wiped my sleep from out your eyes.
While much like music, ardor wanes and swells
with measures both of stillness and of tone,
I fear that every silent breath foretells
how at your core all sound of me is gone.
Though I may dry to dust I won't be blown
from off the sentinel branches of life's crux;
your name anoints the hollows in the bone
and sates with faith opinions still in flux.

Though clouds conceal the water from all sight,
you pull the ocean up the beach each night.

Archeology

I'm a writer. I say that despite that fact that I rarely write anymore. To be fair, I wasn't particularly prolific at my high water mark either, but it was more than what I manage today.

To say that I'm my harshest critic is perhaps too excoriating a condemnation of criticism and critics. I am my meanest bully. And though I consider myself a person bound to the need to create, my creative impulses bear the worst burden of that bullying.

Through the years I've explored a number of creative outlets. And I've enjoyed all of them intensely. A variety of visual media: from pencil drawings to charcoal and paint, computer graphics and design, 3d animation, architectural drafting and modeling. Dance. Writing. Photography. Music. Most of these outlets have been closed, atrophied in disuse, shut down out of a hopeless inability to live up to my own expectations. And I assure you, my expectations far outreach yours.

I do not say as much out of pride. Why bother hoping to write the Great American Novel, when you can hope to write the work that defines the next two thousand years of intellectual discourse? How's that for overweening? And while it begs the question, "Where does something like that even come from?" and while I've come to a few answers on that count, it begs a far more important question: "How do I go about dismantling such an enormous, detrimental construction?" I'm finding such demolition work is perhaps the effort of a lifetime.

I can still write some, before I'm shut down, and I continue to press on in dance, despite how many minefields I've laid out there too. I've found a bit of a work around in dance--I switched dances, where I could cultivate beginner's mind again without as much self-recrimination. It's not as easy in writing, but it occurs to me that the important aspect of the work in overcoming the self-bullying is not the success, but in the continued focus and determined intent. So I will keep writing, but it will probably continue to be less than I could produce. But then, so what? How much less is it bullying, telling myself I'm not writing enough?

Anyway, what brought this on is the fact that in unpacking all my books yesterday, I found two literary zines a friend published 13 years ago. They'd been sitting in a box in my closet for the last seven years. Two of my poems got into them. They're pretty much the only two things I wrote that wasn't ad copy in my entire post-college 20s. I'll be posting them here in the blog entries that follow.