The Emptiness of Offices and Goldfinches

I had an insignificant small office with a window at the rearmost section of the building where I could see an undeveloped spruce tree

growing from a secret patch of grass protected from the eighteen-wheeler trucks arriving at the shipping dock just twenty feet away. 

Outside my door, an open lab, where quality assurance underneath my diligent direction happened.

Christmas, San Diego John, a quality inspector I had hired, just recently returned from California, who missed the West Coast desperately

and had returned east only for his wife's desire to be back home with family, had gifted me a thistle-feeder, which I hung upon that tree. 

As winter turned to spring I watched the goldfinch flocks begin to turn in color, from a drab and almost gray-like green to brilliant yellow.

I had never seen this spectacle before. It's almost twenty years from that occasion. John had left his family soon thereafter,

moving back to San Diego, and I heard he had a heart attack and died. In time I got a transfer to Materials

and then I was promoted to a bigger office with much more responsibility and then, in time, let go.

But it's the transformation of those small goldfinches that provide this story all its lovely

lack of any allocated quality of all material effect or meaning. I have to thank my great unknowable for that.

Grandfather

I don't remember much about my grandfather. He smoked a pipe. He rapped his knuckles on a table in percussive and sequential ways which seemed magical to me. He pulled a quarter from behind my ear.

He had a little garden with a shed. I remember radishes and cucumbers. One time I saw him weaving his way home from drinking at a local bar and falling to the pavement. One year later, he had a stroke and died.

Behind his house in the woods flowed the Spicket River. I was sure a band of Indians encamped there on their way from the White Mountains to the sea. Later I was told he had an Indian guide which talked to him in spells.

I've hiked the high words of India and all their nonduality of That. I've even asked some questions of the I Ching lately. The fruit of light is always hanging from the tree. The wilderness of wisdom talked to him. It also talks to me.

Belief Story

When I was in the middle of this life, those early thirties in the years encircling 1984, I tried to re-believe in God. I'm talking of a personal relationship with that almighty and omnipresent creator god, a superstar of biblical proportions.

One night while sitting upstairs writing, praying, I felt a drumming in my ears and took it as a sign that God was telling me of his existence. If he existed, then, of course, it was my undertaking here on earth to worship him.

And so I did. And studied fundamentalist compendiums about the Father and the Son and saw salvation in the fact of my belief alone. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I knew such faith was king. 

One night I had a dream. And in that dream, this God of newfound faith was visiting me and asked me if his deep and mind-encompassing voice was really God. It really shook me.

It further asked did I believe because I wanted to believe in something which would answer all my existential doubt or was this voice beyond belief. The words were like electric shock and led me to a nervous breakdown doubting everything I took for granted. 

Little did I know that such a deconstruction of my social conditioning is the actual beginning of the way to truth and in the subsequent confusion float the momentary cinders of destruction

flying in a disappearing face before the clarity of being that original unknown—this energy, intelligence and experienced existence without a thought of any personal belief or clouding images of god or world or me.

A Childlike Shaman Powwow

We were five or six years old when our Great Aunt Izzie came to visit. She was sitting in the rocking chair and I was playing with my cousin on the floor with Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. The world we were creating was a cross between a science-fiction matinee and Gunsmoke.

My mother took Aunt Izzie’s empty teacup and started walking to the kitchen when it happened. First, the sound was just a whispering. My mother turned around and dropped the teacup to the carpet, as if she knew too well the melody and where it came from.

It seemed like nothing much to me. The teacup crashing into shards appeared more curious. I wondered how we could include their fragmentary shapes into our formless burgeoning contraption. Everything is just a game for our amusement at that age.

But the noise was turning into whoops. Aunt Izzie’s hand was drumming on her lips. She was turning Indian before our very eyes. My mother ran into the bathroom fast as I remember ever seeing her in action, slammed the door, and left my cousin and myself to witness Izzie’s transformation.

She must have been past eighty then and always seemed to be collapsing as if her bones were just unable to support the weight of years. But now she straightened proudly with the posture of a warrior and started dancing slowly on the edge as if the space our toys created was a camp fire burning in a cold Algonquian night.

Her shouts were getting louder and they moved her body up and down like popcorn as she continued circling there around our world as if she were the light of all the prehistoric summers that existed here before their death had been invented by the forked tongue words of white men.

She stopped to look at each of us and shined. We nestled in a world of toys and listened Fort Apache style to every secret word she said. She spoke of black holes in another constellation. She showed us light emerging from its winter cave. She tapped into a maple tree and fed us with its lovely harmonies of sweet intoxication.

In a quiet burning voice, she speaks to me alone and tells me what I am and asks me to forget each sound she makes to heal my heart, predicting every year that follows from this moment is a slow remembrance of exactly what I know right now—and what a cosmic trip it is from our first pow to each succeeding wow.

Four Enchantresses Usurping Memories of Richard Nixon - Prose as Poem, Poem as Prose

It was the Nixon Resignation Party, Van Morrison on the stereo singing ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ when she walked in and nothing mattered anymore. Who cares what Nixon knew and when he knew it? Who doesn’t have an eighteen minute gap?

Even that one memory isn’t actually reliable. It’s just a snippet here, a snippet there, and none of it resembles that specific holy now which happened then, or any other version of that moment from another universe we call a person.

She was married but something told me that it didn’t matter. Such prophetic moments will occur because there is no past or future in this universal consciousness and every now and then we know it. Did I really know it then?

Van Morrison is singing, I’m in heaven when she smiles, and Van is not the man but God, and I’m a prophet on a peak envisioning the pre-ordained apocalyptic mother of my cherished only child. I turn to Jesus, pass the joint, and say some words to this effect, I’m looking at the woman who redeems my overly materialistic world forever into now, and Christ says, man, that’s sacred stuff!

The rest is like some psychoactive dream. Her marriage heads out for the territories. We make love like Rosalita jumping higher. Five years later on, our guru child is born to teach us sacrificial love. But shit begins to happen faster than our amplifiers process it and this distortion ends in ultimate divorce upon the silver anniversary of John’s assassination.

The next thing that I know I’m standing in the ICU, my mother on the brink of death, although she’d last another four momentous months for daily heart-to-hearts; ex-wife, with our nomadic much-missed daughter all the way from California, surprisingly enough is there; and at my side my soul-mate lover for these latest thirteen years not knowing that we’d split apart the next one. I stop to look at these four universe-creating, life-transforming, heart-wise earth-strong women, and say something wise like right here right now within this single room are ALL the womenfolk who ever drove me unconditionally crazy.

But crazy in this world is sane. And sanity is love. And what I meant to say is love is all there is but it’s just filtered by the constant cloud of automatic unintentional unconscious thought, and these four influential goddesses have taught me that such undiluted love is more than just a lyric from a song. And this would light the way to other teachers teaching me there is no me, and further that this love there is, is all I am, indwelling in the unknown Absolutely Sweet Marie! For ‘Blonde on Blonde’ was playing on the stereo by then.