Sojourn

May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes, your batteries just run out of juice. Living in Alaska, these last many years, I’ve become attuned to how much I need to recharge my spirit. In the winters, it’s the long dark nights of coldness that drain me, leaving me always dreaming of sunny beaches, of places far away from the sleeping mountain views of my home. There in the winter, you have to find activity to keep yourself going, almost as an act of sheer will, because if you give in to the mood, a depression sets in. I’m one of those people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder. My emotions are solar-powered, apparently.

And this idea isn’t limited to sunlight or the weather, it also extends into our social lives. I’ve met people in Alaska who live way out in the bush, who seldom interact with other people, save when they need to come into town for supplies or just to check in and see if the world is still going on. I’ve often dreamed of that kind of seclusion, all the books I would write, the time playing guitar, wandering off to climb mountains in a meditative silence, just me and the great expansive world surrounding. But I don’t think I’m made for that kind of experience as a lifestyle. I crave noise and people and moments, new experiences.

I think it’s important to find new things in life to embrace, it keeps you growing. I’ve always been the kind of person to throw myself into any situation with all my heart, not wanting to take a single second of it for granted. But moments end, situations change, and people head in different directions. It’s easy to become nostalgic for things you have experienced in your past, but when you think back on them too much, you dwell on those fading memories and then life starts to slip past you. This is how people lose their dreams and fall into routine.

The trick in making your present stay full of that vivid life is to first embrace it, and then allow it to change, and if the direction of that change is aligned with the compass bearing of your heart, you follow. And if not, then so be it. And when I find myself at a point that the present no longer provides me with what I need or want, I have to seek out something else to keep my spirit alive. Are we all like this, or am I just a malcontent after all? But then, letting go can also be a trick when your emotions are involved and people in your life play an active role in shaping your design, be it from the will of love or the malice of lies.

That said, the circumstances of my life took me away from the road, which has been a good thing, because it’s also important to take time to reflect, to evaluate, and to find what it is that is or is not working in your life. From there, you gain a certain sense of clarity. The problem with being in the moment is that it’s easy to be swept away in it all, but you have to keep your senses about you. Nevertheless, this time away from the road has afforded me some good time to write, reflect, and see things more for what they are as opposed to what my emotions had me believe. It’s strange that the brain and the heart often do not communicate well with one another.

But once you get to that point, it’s easy to then slip into the dull comfortable lull of the mundane. Then, in my case, I start to over-analyze everything. Which is okay, to some extent, so long as there’s something to keep feeding the think-machine in your brain and a way to channel it out afterwards. Once you run out of fuel though, all that thought can turn destructive, make you slip, like with seasonal affective disorder, into that negative state of your mind or your heart.

For me, the road is where I find salvation. I love the world, and I love the people that I meet. Even some of the crazy messed up people of the world have some kind of story or some kind of insight. For every person that you meet, you are given an opportunity to learn more about the world, and about yourself. My life path is one of discovery. I want to know who is behind the curtain, what is behind all three doors, what the answer to the riddles are. Why? Well, why not?

To me, a fate worse than death is living a life where I go to work, go home, pay bills, watch TV, eat shitty food, save for tomorrow, and go to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. I’m not saying that this way of life is bad, it works for some people, but certainly not for me, not unless there was something truly amazing to make that experience worth the compromise. But then, I have yet to find anything worth it to me to do so. If I had it my way, I would live on permanent vacation. Having seen the possibility of the last living breathing moments of my life once before, I feel it created in me a vivid perception of the world. But when things turn to a lackluster shade, my discontent begins to grow inside.

And in times of solitude, like now sitting here in Mississippi, spending my days writing, I can also run out of that proverbial juice that feeds the world in my heart. In a way, it’s almost manic in the sense that when I’m lost in a moment, everything is so rich and vibrant, I get carried away by the river of it all, but when the moment ends and I take the time to reflect on it, eventually that spark dims like the last drops of an oil lamp, flickers dully, then extinguishes into another ghost of a memory. Those memories will always live inside, of course, but in them, there is only thought, no longer filled with the great emotions that cultivated their creation, a fading cathartic distance.

But when your focus is on writing about them, you have to revisit those places. In a way, it’s like trying to have a conversation with a dead relative. You’ll always have those memories and love for them, but the dialogue is no longer alive. So, in my case, I find new experiences to fill that lamp with, to stoke the flame, and superimpose them over the ghosts of my reflections. In a way, it’s also kind of like relationships, and how some people will mend the wounds of one relationship by taking on another. In this case, when there is nothing left to feel for those memories, I go out and take a new bite out of life, and like the bolt of electricity that brought Frankenstein’s monster back to life, it gives me the energy to send surging through those moments and make them into the polished prose I hope to write.

Here lately, after a great rush of inspiration and subsequent writing, in weeks of endless flow, I feel as though I’ve run out of steam, hitting a point of writer’s block. Perhaps it’s because I’m hung up on one chapter that I’m trudging slowly but diligently through, perhaps it’s because I’m debating on how honest to be with my work (whether to portray characters as my heart believed them to be, or as they really were), I’m not sure, but this process has all but zapped the energy out of me, and I’ve become distracted, spending more days piddling around the house thinking about writing instead of actually writing. If you’re a writer, you know this pain – it fills you with doubt about your ability to write, makes you question your work, your thoughts, it is a long inner struggle that in tiring coffee fueled nights seems unrelenting.

So when these moments come to pass, my instinct is always to get out and recharge. However, in my case, I came here to MS to seclude myself in order to write, but now that I feel as though I need a break, there’s not really anywhere to go around here. I could go meditate in the woods, throw stones in a creek, watch another sunrise (I drink coffee all night and never fall asleep until morning these days), but really, I need another fix of people and places and sounds. I’ve already written about this in a previous blog, and perhaps this is nothing more than a solipsistic ramble, but it helps to extricate these thoughts, because thinking about thinking can be a thought process in it of itself, one with nowhere in particular to go.

The truth is, my mind is awash with a thousand thoughts a second, because in my head, nothing ever really fades, all thoughts overlapping in a great ringing noise of washed out detail. So, taking time to relax and be among friends and have some new experiences gives me the ability to sort through those things. And not that there’s really anything to sort out anymore, because all of the recent experiences of the last few months are nothing more to me than a story to be told, written, edited, published, and finally put on the shelf to collect dust so I can move on to the next thing.

That said, I’m getting very excited at the prospect of heading out on the road again. I’ve had some very interesting offers and am debating whether I’ll finish this work here after a short jaunt to Chicago, or if I’ll follow those cues from the world and see where they take me. It is, however, difficult to write with the level of focus I need when I’m swimming in the river, so the disciplined side of me tells me to go have some fun and come back and finish the last part of this book. But then, I have it mapped out already, and I feel like I should make my way back to Alaska and finish it there, among friends, and in a place I love and miss dearly at this point. Of course, we’ll see how much I miss it once the winter comes again.

I like the idea of not knowing. Questions are where we are driven to grow and learn in life. We don’t always like what we find out when we question, but it teaches us those things to learn and grow from. I set out on this journey with great hopes for one thing, and found something entirely different, though twice as beautiful. I found my life again, and I’m grateful for it. Your life is just a sojourn through time, don’t waste a moment of it on anything but that which brings you love and joy.

Filed Under: Thoughts, Travel, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Lackluster Filibuster

May 28, 2012 By 2 Comments

The purgation of my vilified reason
of my heated river that boils in the annals of my dreams
documented in the gaslight vapors of coffee shops
peers through a truth denied by distance

born in these vapid visions through thinly frosted glass, an illusion
so weak it wouldn’t stop a pebble sent flying
a mere ripple of trite countenance
that in malice was thrown from the abyss

from memories of my collocated affections
familiar patterns that reveal themselves in untidy declarations
almost a ghost of apathetic reflection
this catharsis calls to me in great waves of revelation.

Filed Under: Poetry, Thoughts, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,

So what is your book about?

May 26, 2012 By 5 Comments

I’ve been asked this question a number of times about the book I’m writing, Soledad Savant, and have always stumbled on giving an articulate description of the book, a synopsis. So I decided to write out, in simplest terms, what I am writing about :

The story centers around a protagonist, told from the first person perspective, who is lost in life and looking for some kind of meaning. Having battled depression and affliction his entire life, he lives in a cycle of bad relationships, working unfulfilling jobs, and drifts from place to place over the course of his life, looking for the reason and purpose of his existence and the tools to mend the wounds of his heart and mind. The story follows him, after suffering a failed marriage and leaving a job he no longer finds joy in, from the cold snowy mountains of Alaska, down the west coast on the hitch, where he eventually connects with Jasmine Rosetti, an old friend of whom he had been corresponding with over the last few months. A love interest develops, is pursued and in glorious elation, embraced in an explosive meeting of romance and passion in the streets and hotel rooms of San Francisco and the majestic coast north. But the girl of whom he rests his heart-yearning salvation on is also afflicted from a previous divorce. Her own afflictions create another great wound in his heart, and at a point in his life when he no longer has the strength to endure another wound of this nature. His world, without the defense of home or the safety net of his friends and family, unravels as he falls first into depression, and finally into madness. The streets come to life with angels and demons, a great battle for his heart in the random conversations and experiences of his lost and wandering days. The crescendo of the storm finally comes when he is faced with the greatest of desolations in his heart, and then finds salvation in the strangest of places, in the faces of strangers, and from ghosts who have haunted his dreams.

Filed Under: Novel, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

2nd Excerpt from Soledad Savant

May 24, 2012 By 2 Comments

In the ghost-light of morning that crawls all smoky orange through the curtain slivers, I wake up and quietly dress and slip out the door and take the car down the road to that old-west looking café we passed by on the way to yesterday’s sun-setting beach, the shop opening just minutes before I got there, and buy yogurt with fresh fruit and granola, a couple of breakfast-type bagel sandwiches and coffee and bring them back to the room, waking her with soft affection words in her goddess ears, her legs shuffling slowly under the sheets – her bright green eyes hesitantly searching for focus and finds me then all smiling there on the edge of the bed for her. She sits up slowly and looks around, noticing the food-spread on the nightstand, her saying, “You went and got me breakfast?”

“I’d serve you breakfast in bed every day if I could, Bluebird.”

“I love when you call me that, by the way. It makes me feel more yours.”

I smiled at her with the full expansive universe in my big bang heart, all celestial event mornings in my gratitude manifestation, the divine love-sharings one dreams up when falling crazily mad for a girl, like breakfasts in bed and flowers and sonnets, thinking this woman is going to turn me into a romance novelist some day. We turn on some music and nibble away at our food, having bought more than we can finish and drink our coffee and then she goes to take a shower and I go outside loading bags into the car – then back in to take in a couple of moments of her hot wet skin in the shower, slipping in to wash her back and she smiles, pulling me into her hips and we trace each other’s body curves and dimples and nipples and the glorious shape of her woman’s thighs, a great sculpture of the perfect Lady Madonna lost in the Christ vision of her temptation embrace, and the morning starts off with the kind of lost moaning that is found like salvation in the sublime shaking throbs of mutual orgasms born in the great poetry of the body’s writhing sex-motion.

After packing everything into the car, we drop the key in the slot of the locked office door and wander the sunrise property of the hotel. Behind the building, facing the grassy end of the Tomales Bay, are big patches of cat-tails and swamp like pond lilies and water grown grass reeds reaching from below the water’s surface – the scene lined with a long wooden walkway leading all the way out to the bay water, though not quite a dock. Across the bay are long brown grassy hills, waving along like sheets on a clothing line in soft summer gusts of salted sea air, where the sky and the land make love with the harmony of peaceful horizon-shapes, a symphony of overlapping contours matched by the gentle palate of morning colors to fill in the vision, all tucked under a great cloudless sky full of hopeful promises for the romance drive up to Mendocino.

The first song of the morning tour was “Searching for the Ghost” by the Heartless Bastards, the radio was loud and clear like the windshield, no signs yet of highway bugs-death on the portrait glass in the cool spring air, curving out of Point Reyes Station along the low waterfront beaches, winding past long treeless hills and then into Marshall, little stilted shacks and sailor bars for oyster farmers or weekenders up from the city or sports fisherman or the like, old closed down tilted saloon sagging sadly on the derelict strip of vacated buildings, little spokes of old docks long washed away point out to the ocean where big sea birds sit meditatively staring into the reflection waters looking for breakfast – along the coast-farms and cottages and little vista pull-offs on the bluffs and roadside buttresses rising out of the ocean, the road in the surrender to the will of these majestic cliffs, old pipes and fences and blast points to shield the roads and cars from falling rocks as the hills meet the ocean in a great violent collision of time, where life and men have carved their way between two contrasting worlds and find the beauty edge for hopeful eyes, like ours all oohing and aahing and rubbernecking as the curves snake back and forth and up all looking down in big heart-palpitating beats of stunning breathless glory of the earth, a great thankful scene to set this divine feeling of falling in love to – I lay my hand on her tender-legs, her skirt billows in the wind rolling in from the sea-breeze washing in through the window and tossing her glorious dark locks of curly hair around her sun-glassed face of sunshine, she all smiling and angelic and mine, the whole sad life-lived memories of all the lonely lost days all gone and washed away, a baptism of pure unfolding love, a divine mystical connection, borne of humble shy beginnings in sheepish nights of my youth longing, so far away now, and all the long life lived and the miles and madness and sadness of it all, now gone and only here, this moment, this great endless road leading up to Mendocino, so curved and full of beauty that ten miles as the crow flies becomes an hour of sweet oblivious wonder, the yellow dotted line-curves and our gentle affections, her subtle-trembling hand on mine and a great dream in the hazy ambiance of washed out Pacific light and the deep timeless ocean, all is the glory of being.

“You know,” I said, leaning into another long curve, “more than anything, I’m glad we’re friends, Jasmine.”

“That’s funny, Ed. I was just watching you drive, thinking the same thing. I’m glad you’re in my life.”

My spirit was made of a billion candles burning in the image of the sun for her. We cut through ranchlands and farmlands going inland and ever expansive, through forest groves past cedar homes with big stone chimneys and long open fields for yards where dogs ran in happy tail-wagging joy outside in little packs of mismatched sizes and breeds, domesticated freedom pups and children picking at the dirt with sticks, looking for worms or rocks or some imaginary treasure. She points out a bird on a high power line watching us drive by, “Did you see that bird up there? It was huge, and was watching us, our car specifically, as we drove past. It looked mean.”

“No,” I replied, my eyes intent on the road lines and oncoming traffic and all the other people looking over their shoulders at the splendor of the world, “I’m busy keeping us from becoming a splatter of rust and bones at the bottom of one of these cliffs, what was it?”

“I think it was a California Condor,” she said, knowledgably.

“What did it look like?”

“It was big, and had a fat red head.”

“You mean a vulture then?”

“No, I mean a condor, Ed. Oh look,” she said pointing up to another power line post on the side of the road, “there’s another!”

“Looks like a vulture to me,” I said, pulling slowly to a stop on the roadside to get a better look.

“You’re thinking of the birds with drooping necks, like in Loony Tunes cartoons or something. Clearly that one doesn’t have a drooping neck, does it?”

“Looks like a vulture to me, look at that head!”

“They’re kind of the same, if I’m not mistaken, but that is definitely a condor.”

“No it’s not,” I said, laughing at her.

“You wanna bet,” she said, pulling out her phone to look it up.

“Sure, what’ll you give me when you lose, hmm?”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet, Ed? I always win.”

“So how’s the search going,” I asked, pointing at her phone.

“We don’t seem to be getting any service out here, but I’ll show you, just you wait. And you’re gonna be sorry for it too!”

“How convenient,” I said mockingly.

“Okay, we’ll see next time we get service.”

“I’ll be holding my breath.”

“So what are the terms of the bet?”

“Anything the winner wants,” I said, confidently.

“You’re prepared to write a blank check?”

“Sure, because I won’t be.”

“Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

“I suppose so,” I said, driving on, letting the gas tanks of our hearts burn in the expanse of this evolving highway-romance, though gratefully and always full – we laughed and joked along the way, listening to music, swapping tunes we’d been dig’n on, stopped in little rustic side of the road town for water and snacks and thought maybe we should grab a beer for the road, to pull over somewhere and picnic or just dig on the scene and clink a glass bottle or two and cheers to the world, find our way up to Bodega Bay and pull off to long butted beach, great crashing waves filled with the small dots of surfers on little slivers of boards rising and falling in the ocean surge looking out to the nowhere horizon for that one perfect wave to catch with a film crew there on the shore to capture the documentary vision – climb down to the hot sand and cool slow surf that reaches up to erase your footprints like time and your memories – collect little rocks for Bluebird’s garden back home, jaspers and agates in bright greens and reds with ocean swept calcite deposits running like veins along the sides, she going all, “ohhh look at this one, it’s so pretty,” and, “wow, look at that one too!” Soon she’s got more than she can carry and I find a little potato chip bag washing up on the shore and go pick it up and she commends me for cleaning up the beach litter and I smile and wash it out in the surf and bring it over and put all her rocks inside, now overflowing from her eager hands, she all happy with her expedition’s booty and stops to give me a big ole smooch as the waves go a big thunderous crashing and then swoosh and hiss as they pull back out in the undertow, the lullaby lull of the waves and the enigmatic honey taste of her lips, though not lip-balmed, and my heart, always my heart, this glorious tugging at my guts with every beat of this sweet surrender. It was here, on this beach in this moment, that I knew for sure that I was hopelessly, madly in love with this woman, Jasmine Rosetti, the sweetest Bluebird to ever fly into the eyes of my forever vision.

It was like a game of leapfrog – us, the pullovers and the vistas that stretched so endlessly down the road, that at a certain point all the elated chatter about the beautiful nature of every sponge-soaking vision along the way soon droned into the silent appreciative breath-holding of a great meditative silence – the wind and the music and the soft squeal of tires on s-turns crawling up and down the sides of the ocean cliffs, our only narration for what seemed to be hours. We pulled off north of Bodega Bay, by the Sunset Boulders, me remembering a time I had seen somewhere along the coast these great bulbous stone heads sitting on torsos of rock that look like a semi-circle of wise old men watching forever the sunsets of the Pacific, as though stoic oracles or great poets in an eternal contemplation, mythical shapes of sea-washed gods peering silently into the gaze of Helios. We walked the dirt-grass trail towards the edge of the cliffs, but I couldn’t find the rocks, and Bluebird said she was feeling a little hungry and also a bit ill from all winding carsick motion, and so we decided to turn back and press on, leaving the memory of those stones behind…

Filed Under: Novel, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A Portrait of Washington Square

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sts. Peter and Paul Church on Washington SquareThe vision of your bedroom comes into slow focus, you lose sight of the images tucked in your subconscious in incremental driftings as your awareness of the light-space surrounding comes to breathing beating life, look around at the curtains and the soft-light glow of your morning, at your toes hanging out the other end of your blanket, a silent moment that is yours alone. Next to you is a dream, a memory, or maybe divinity if you’re still dreaming, that space on the other side of the bed you never sleep in, the one that belongs to a lover, past or present, or maybe the hope you have to some day fill it with soft sunrise affections, a breath of sentiment when you don’t have to leap from your bed and rush into the routine of your day, shuffle out of your room, turn the water on, fill the kettle and let it whistle as you rub your eyes, loose green tea and folded worlds of newspaper, a sort of voyeuristic apathy about a world going on around you, drink your tea and step into the tub, the warm piped rain and your skin spirit washed, cleansed, the dream is still asleep in your bed.

Outside the world is churning, children bouncing from the curb to the steps of a bus, parents stand in semi-circles talking about the neighborhood and their children’s upcoming play at the school, taxis look for fares as garbagemen play leap frog with city blocks, the summer mornings are warm, walk past the corner cafe, inside the aroma of pastries and charred coffee and caramel greets you at the door, one more for the road, you think. It’s your turn to taxi to work, your turn to look back as you drive away from your bed, your room, your home. The sounds of honking cars and jackhammers filter through the glass, the cabbie makes polite for conversation, but you haven’t heard a word he’s said, replying in kind with “uh huh’s” and “sure’s” and then drift back into your gaze, policemen in intersections with white gloves and whistles, impatient hurry up eyes sit staring at his outstretched hands peering through curved landscape glass, morning joggers jumping up and down at crosswalks with headphones in their own private world, the music and the breath the extent of their oblivion, past flower shops on the go again, that place you sprung for the sentiments of all your love, just this last February, now just a folded weathered receipt still in your wallet, months along, another dream that left you as you awoke one morning in early March.

Past the park as old sages of desolation wrap their wares up in plastic, tucked back into their packs from their beds of wood and steel, long cold night benches, where no dreams are revealed, just existing. Old Asian men and woman writhe in the rising sun, lost in a trance of motion and breath, a ritualistic movement that flows like the ocean, the world saunters past, the staggering angels of all night’s abandon asleep at last in great city blocks of green manicured grass as the church bells ring the morning into an official time, up the hill, round the corner and pay the fare, thinking better you should walk the rest of the way.

Life is more vivid on the streets, the bells of Sts. Peter and Paul chiming once more, the reverberation fading into the ambient collective voice of North Beach in the morning. All amnesiac angels of the divine manifestation obliviously disconnected in their worlds, their lives, their afflictions, their dreams, all dreamers lost in the oceans of hope and experience, all waking up and eating and loving and missing and working and deaths and births and hopes and trials and salvation, all is just a dream.

Filed Under: Poetry, Thoughts, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Let it go

May 18, 2012 By 10 Comments

Years ago, I watched a movie called Altered States about a science type that used the combination of psychedelic drugs and a sensory deprivation tank to conduct self-administered psychological experiments. Of course, that movie is more of a horror flick as he regresses back into a primal state. But I’ve been thinking about how sensory deprivation, in many forms, can lead one to regress in various ways. Here, for instance, in Mississippi, I’ve taken leave of the road to sit down in isolation to write this novel, Soledad Savant. The vast emptiness of this flat land, nestled in the wooded prairies of this desolate and sparsely populated area, contrasted with my life in great big Alaska with high voluptuous mountains and all filled with the friends of my now-life, has become my own version of the sensory deprivation tank. And, metaphorically speaking, the road was the psychedelic drug of this experiment – because when you put yourself out there, as most travelers who skip the tour groups and venture down the side streets of the world know, the world can become a strange psychedelic experience, filled with epiphanies and revelations, where the mundane suddenly springs to life and screams out at you from the usually unnoticed corners of everywhere. People speak your heart unintentionally, you suffer long bouts of doubt and question your motives, you look inwards as everything outside shuffles past almost so fast it blurs and you can only hang on enough to capture the little notes and photographs in selected images, too much to fully take in.

And when you leave that experience, and the great turbulent tide of the world saunters off in low receding waves, you are left with the meditations of all that just happened. Have you ever been in a car wreck? It’s like the moment is this violent intense experience, and then afterwards is the thoughtful memory of what happened and all the time it takes to recover from it, from your injuries, or from being the witness to the injuries (if not death) of others. Years ago, a friend and I were the first two people on the scene of a car wreck, where these high school cheerleaders had played a prank by teepee’ing somebody’s house, whose dad subsequently chased them off, and they went screaming down the road, taking a corner too fast, and slid off the road, down a great big hill, and drove straight into a tree that stopped their momentum in a violent second, leaving three girls dead, one unconscious, and one who crawled out and up the hill and flagged us down. It was the middle of the night, we had to stop by my friend’s house in that neighborhood, because he had forgotten his ID. We were on our way to meet friends at a bar, and then after leaving his place, ended up rounding the corner to see this bloodied girl standing on the side of the road, hysterical.

I can’t even imagine the horror or affliction this girl lives with, but I know that image has always lived with me. And the reason I bring this up, is that these kinds of memories, and all the glorious ones too, all tend to bubble up when you are left to sit in silence with your meditations. What I’m getting at, is that in my personal now, I’m sitting here thinking about certain experiences that are part of what I am writing about, about a failed love, about the afflictions of my own life, about all the things that compelled me to get to where I am now. And when there is no distraction, all of these peripheral memories have a tendency to bubble up, to cloud your thoughts, until everything in your head becomes white noise.

When I was going through my divorce, about a year and a half ago, I was overwhelmed with a great heavy thought process, all the things I dwelled on, the could haves or should haves, all the failed hopes and dreams and intentions. And attachment to the idea of a life, not even a tangible thing, just a notion, brought me the greatest of sufferings. I began to drink myself to death, putting down a fifth of whiskey a day, standing in the cold snowy nights in front of my house chain smoking as I looked at the ground while the aurora borealis raged overhead. In my grief, I didn’t even notice. And a friend, at the time just a neighbor, showed me compassion and pulled me out of my snowdrift. We talked, I felt human again, stopped drinking, and next thing you know, I’m doing yoga every day for something like 80 days straight. I cried in my practice, I felt things falling out of me that I had no idea where they came from, things unrelated to my divorce, and I realized all the affliction I’ve carried over the years, from being abused and left for dead as child, growing up on the streets, the long series of bad relationships, being a drug addict vagabond, to an overdose that almost took my life and took months to physically recover from. But had I ever emotionally recovered from any of it?

That’s when I left for Alaska, years ago, on the notion that I had to go breathe. I wanted to get into the middle of nowhere to sort it out, and through course of action and lucky circumstance, found myself managing a hostel in Denali Alaska one summer. From there, I made friends with some amazing people, it’s where I met my ex-wife, actually. And by bringing her up, let me add that she is an amazing woman, to this day. The process of divorce was painful, but it had to happen because we were just not properly paired for one another. It took me some time to see that, but since then, we have rediscovered the friendship that drew us to one another again. She is now one of the best friends I have, complete with all the inside jokes nobody else would ever get. It’s good.

But back on Alaska, I spent time climbing mountains on my days off, finding little places to meditate and think, but always my thoughts were raging in the silence of the rocks and sky and wind and the expansive horizon that always tempted the gaze of my eyes. It was up there, one afternoon on Morning Mountain, that I heard the song of the mountains for the first time. And it was a song specific to those mountains, because I believe every place in the world has its own tune. And of Denali (which means the “High One” in native Alaskan languages) the song was one of this great desolate loneliness. And I’ll always have to consider that maybe it sang a tune specifically to me, but I felt it was speaking its own ambient heart. People, for instance, visit Denali during the short window of the summer months, but in the winter, everything is boarded up and abandoned until the next tourist season, the winters too dark, too long, and too cold. The bears hibernate, the birds fly south, even the ravens move into town to scavenge the city dumpsters for food during the winter.

And I felt this tune all the way down and realized that this was the affliction of my heart. I am a lonely troubled man, who wishes for nothing but love in his life, but cannot seem to find it, or only find it in fleeting moments. And you want to believe that love transcends time, and I suppose it does, because I have love in my heart for everybody I’ve ever felt that for, even those who are no longer in my life-view these days, but then there’s the part where desire and love become entwined, and thus begins the journey into suffering. But, I always think, isn’t love worthy of desire, is it so wrong to want something good in your life? No, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s the attachment to the nature or duration that causes these afflictions in our heart-lives. It’s not so much that there’s an expectation as it is a hope. And hope can be a very powerful thing, but it can cut just as much as it can heal. Nevertheless, I will always continue to hope, because we have to, it’s our responsibility to keep pushing for something better, something more in life. This is the only one we have, we have to embrace it.

And embracing it is where I have found another great joy-affliction in my life. A strange dichotomy, to be sure, but a very dualistic and real one. Because embracing the world is where I find the well of my compelling nature, this wanderlust that resides in me, the need to keep looking. In one way, it brings me to the road and shows me all the glorious visions of my life-world, but in the other instance, it has been what has kept me from living a “normal” life, all the hitchhiking, moving from state to state, taking new lives at the first hint of decline in the now of my then. I’m at a point that I realize I’ll never have any hope for retirement. Leaving for this trip, leaving my work and the security of a well-paying job, to go back into the world on the road to find what makes it tick, what makes me tick, was a very hard decision, because I had grown to know the sweet seduction of comfort. That’s the hook. And there’s nothing wrong with that life, I can only imagine all the great Buddhas of the world all Zen’ed out in their living rooms on couches, lulled into a passive trance by the dull blue glow of their televisions, their heart rate all calm and their breathing all unintentional. It’s just that for me, I can’t find a home in that world, and I’ve tried, but this Promethean flame in my heart burns, burns, burns at my life when I attempt to surrender to that world.

Nothing wrong with any of it, I am what I am, you are what you are, and we are what we are. And though being on the road can be difficult, lonely (and oh the lonely days sitting on the edge of an onramp in the middle of nowhere trying not to let drivers see your tears as you feel the end of the world is going to be your next ride) and leave you feeling lost about it all, even that suffering is part of the perfect beauty of everything. I think, for me, the trick is let my pendulum swing wide and vast, that I can taste those burning moment-visions of my life and world around me, and then seek the solitude I find in the respite of quiet reflection. That said, I’m about ready to hit the road again, put this book on pause, and head up to Chicago to see some friends and get lost in the noise, a recharge if you will. I’ll probably catch a Cubs game too, because Wrigley Field is like church to me. It’s not the sports-hero worship or anything, it’s the energy of that particular field and the love the people have for their team, despite the fact that they’ll always be “the lovable losers.”

And maybe that’s why I love the Cubs (but don’t really like baseball)… I think I’m destined to be a bum. I grew up on the streets, and I’ll probably end up there again some day. But oh the stories and moments and people and places… what a beautiful buzz, right? Love every bit of it as madly and intensely as you can, and then let it go.

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Mongolian Ovoo

May 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

Outside of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in the vast stretches of great rolling plains tended by the nomadic sheep herders, we came across this ovoo up on a high hill overlooking the endless forever horizon. At these spiritual cairns, those who travel past make an offering of stone, coin, or some other treasure by tossing it to the base and then in meditative reflection, walk three times around clockwise for safe travels. Needless to say, one more stone sat at the base of this one before I ventured on. – AUG/2011

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Birdsong

May 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

The mornings here in rural MS – as though anywhere in MS is not rural – are filled with the sunrise symphony of birds, an overwhelming chorus of brightly colored chaos and song, a soundscape that borders on the divine, just moments before the sky turns to light. Lately, my nights have blended into mornings, driven by long mad thoughts about words and memories, trying to formulate the perfect notion-prose of visions for my heart-meanderings, this novel I’ve been working on. The coffee-talks with my memory ghosts are often so faint, it becomes difficult to capture the full splendor of the experience, and you (or I as it were) toil with finding the right way to compose the manifestation, looking inward for every subtle symbology that could perfectly resurrect those experiences in something fit for the world instead of being some horrible Mary Shelley monster that sadly is forced into a tortured existence by the workings of pride or ego.

When one chooses the happenings of their own life to write about, it becomes a battle with that ego-self, because inside you realize it is not really about you but the world you live in and how you experience it. Divinity is not something that one finds in their self when meditatively honest, but in the eyes and conversations of the world that reflects back to them the intrinsic nature of all beings. To gaze into the inexplicable-beyond through the vessel of others is where I find the beauty of all life. But it is our attachment to those moments and our subjective perceptions about them that can distort the order of the invisible will of all things that pass through the temporal now and reside forever in the web of time.

It is an observation, where the no-self puts aside the contrivances of self-awareness in so much as it becomes some kind of surrender. But the ego-self rebells against this, it is the nature of its being, it must reflect itself and stay in the focus of your observations, convinced that you cannot exist without it. It is a strange dichotomy. And the split this creates, the dualistic nature of your world, what you see beyond the shell of your skin, to what you think, feel, hope, need, desire, fear, etc. can drive one absolutely mad when given the analytical devices to deconstruct those moments for the purpose of mining the little gems of our days. It is a constant battle to resist the temptations of pride, but when you silence that thought in whatever you observe, the sounds of the outside become overwhelmingly vivid, as though the universe was speaking directly to you through every sensation’s nerve ending, where you feel the wave of great moments in great people in glorious beautiful places, and even hidden in the dull mundane. It exists there, in the smallest of crevices, waiting to be uncovered.

Every person a novel waiting to be written, every sunrise a painting waiting for the master stroke of a brush, every birdsong waiting for its composer to take down the notes of its tune. We live in a vibrant world, filled with so many wonders, and yet we suffer each other’s opinions, mistakes and misunderstandings, these human defects that lead to the great sorrows of the world in the forms of wars, of jealousies, of intolerances of others unlike ourselves. We bear the fruit of our own afflictions by the choices we make and the attachment to our perceptions, but when we free ourselves of those attachments and judgements, we find that all is divine, that all is glorious, that every sunsetting lost memory of our hearts was an entire universe of the most spectacular vision.

It’s funny how staying up too late, amped on coffee and torn by thoughts of memories and words can lead one to be quiet in a moment on a screened-in porch in the predawn light and find the salvation song of birds was meant for them and that moment, a great sharing of beauty, but only a moment in passing, yet always the gift of being. Beauty in the mundane.

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Up high in the Chugach

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Prayer spot up near Flat Top Mountain in Anchorage.

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Excerpt from Soledad Savant

May 14, 2012 By 4 Comments

It was the long winter that drove me nearly mad, and not necessarily all the great white sheets of snow draped over the cold rolling hills up to giant mountain peaks that loomed over the coastal city of Anchorage, not just the long dark nights of my discontent, but some great loneliness that sings in the chorus of those buried great mountains. Where in the long light of summer I would climb them in the silent days of heavy breathing – up sharp craggy rocks and over steep death defying scree fields sloping down to a mangled broken body vision, heart throttled in fear, reach great big peak and climb with rock hammer and spike and mount long strings of Buddhist prayer flags to stretch from there to the next sharp toothy rock jutting up out of the crumbling stone – a place to pray in my summer sunlit nights for the peace to release me from this burden in my heart-life – the long lonely memories of divorce and solitude and my past life as a vagabond malcontent in the retrospective meditations of history and time.

     But when the winter comes, the light retreats and you feel a disassociation from the world, as though an exile in the apocalypse of your flesh-spirit. And during this sad winter in early 2012, I found myself all at once overcome with the notion that my life was meaningless, that in my lonely days, all I could do was go to work and pay bills and that’s how the world works, sure, but for some reason I felt that if I continued this pattern I may just go crazy, and what’s the big hopeless point in collecting all these things (these artifacts of my past life) that I had from a previous marriage if I was going to be all lonely in my little studio apartment in the Fairview neighborhood – my life reduced to the sad counting of time. And so with great impulse, I gave everything I owned away and took a room with a friend up in Stuckagain Heights on the well to do hillside of Anchorage. And the weather up there was fierce – every day was shoveling snow or long slick drive down windy roads to my work as a journalist – and I spent long years looking through the lens of my camera at the rest of the world to tell the stories of others that the day I heard the wailing of my own heart and looked inside to figure out why I have always carried this affliction within, suddenly nothing made sense anymore. Because what is life without love?

      And I am haunted by the ghosts of my experiences just the same as these mountains are haunted by the days that murder moons endlessly – time always quieting the subtle song of the skies – the Chugach Range reaching like a great plains skeleton along the Turnagain Arm in the wondrous splendor of glaciers and always cold water running between the hips of her desire – earth’s great masterpiece, one last remaining refuge from the bulldozers of dogma. I was heavy with the sickness of loneliness and it churned in me a great storm and the gales of my heart reached through the abyss of my memories until at long last, a great big sigh of intention was born – it was time to leave.

     To the chagrin of my employers, I told them I was done working and that I wouldn’t be coming back. Of course, they worried about me. Who gets rid of everything and darts off into the unknown when the world is rioting for jobs and money and a piece of some failed dream – I musta been suicidal to give it all up, and they pleaded with me to consider staying or just take a short trip or come back soon, but the only good trip is the one where the destination is so far and vast that you have to learn to make it along the way – where the destination is but the journey itself. I had gone to sleep one morning and realized that I no longer woke up in the world I had made for myself, but instead found myself awake in the world of my dreams, the unknown tomorrow waiting to tell me these very words.

     And with great reverence for the many friends I had made over the years in Anchorage, I spent the last many days in grateful company of my friends, my heart recording the visions of their laughter, of their faces, of the great many details that make people the wondrous manifestations of god-face all glorious diamond stars who reach out of the void to touch one another, all part of some great connected being, this absinthian universe and its infinite personalities, all the jokes and laughter – a harmony of a beautiful sensation like heart flutters that linger in your belly when you feel love or joy and it beats a rum pum pumming in your guts and makes your hairs stand on end and the blood in your body turns cool and you cheer with beers at the beautiful goodbyes and people take pictures and wish you well, and you bounce like a parade from bar to bar, all balloons and ticker tape hoorays until the long last night comes to frantically pack everything up and the night gets cold and quiet and you realize that the next day brings you the strange sweet seduction of the unknown, a lingering fear that wraps onto your last warm sleep wondering if you’ll ever be warm again, and will you know such great loves as my friends here. And why am I compelled, I think, to always run away when I feel this tugging at my heart strings, what in my life keeps pulling me from the world I’ve grown to know and shake it up and turn it inside out, inspecting my own life like an archeologist who digs in the desert sites of my heart for some ineffable meaning to make clear the reason I’m even living – and I feel this overwhelming sadness course through my manic last night and in great sobs of silence in the last night of my hillside room, I go to sleep wondering if I’ll ever see these people again, and what might happen out there, and at my age, maybe I’m making a mistake. But then my thoughts turn to my old friend Bluebird, the beautiful jewel of my memory youth, and the letters we’ve been writing each other since finding one another again, and how some crazy spark seems to be lingering in the in-between of our dream text in our thought-words on hope paper mailed back and forth these last many months, and maybe I’d find my way to her in the middle or end or somewhere in between this next great journey, and all the other friends I’ve missed too for so long in the expansive divide of the disconnect of living away from the lower 48 these years in Alaska, and with a confusing drunk melancholy in my hope-thoughts, I fall asleep with the notion that my life was about to unfold – the self-made mystery of my heart-mind – always the addiction of my compulsions.

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