Design (critique)

Hey--so don't you have this "angel"?

And isn't she supposed to give you wisdom and stuff?

So--when you're all worried about life sucking, doesn't she, like...tell you it's all alright and shit?

Ah, yes, Dear Reader--She does, my Angel, explain it All...tho not always in comforting terms...but Laura quoted today from Expecting Adam [buy this book NOW. if you already own it, buy another copy!] ...

the episode where Martha Beck's then-husband John has a nightmare that encapsulates all the suffering of everyone everywhere, "fire, avalanches, and earthquakes, of horrible accidents he could see coming but had no power to prevent." At a certain point in the dream, he feels an angelic Presence close to him, and begins to talk to the angel about the horror he's witnessing.

"It isn't so horrible," the being says to him, "It depends on what you want to see."

What John sees at that moment is a terrible collision between two passenger planes, "raining twisted metal and fire and broken bodies on the ground...But when John looked more closely, he could see that every piece of wreckage was being transformed as it hit the ground. All the debris was recombining, slowly growing into an airport. The people who had been killed in the collision were walking through the new buildings, boarding the new planes."

The angel continues, "You see, they are going places they never could have reached before. It's not so bad, really. It's just that you don't understand how it works."

I take the "it" here to refer to the infinite chaotic interplay of matter and consciousness--too big for any mind to map and too likely, in the eyes of the ego, to appear as tragedy. But the giant fractal of life and death and rebirth could just as likely be neutral, or comic, or romantic...my Angel is as off-handed about "tragedy" as the one encountered by John, when she's not outright flippant about it. But She always guides me to some kind of wisdom (not all of it verbal/book learnin', but that's the only kind I can easily share here)...

Well, what's your angel's opinion on paying down a mortgage loan?

"It may seem the good schoolboy thing to do," she says, "but it will take nearly ten years for you to realize the difference. Those funds could be better applied to a trip to Paris."

Kitty Magick

I have clingy cats. They were separated from their mom at a very early age, as she had FIV. Because of this, my cats are very human-centered, and do unusual things like coming when they're called (or even whistled for). They don't like to be on their own, like a lot of cats; they want a person present whom they can cuddle with or boss around.

One of my cats (the black one, of course) does a magickal ritual to bring me home when I've left, and she even performs this ritual sometimes when I'm in my home office (into which no cats may enter--too much breakable stuff). The ritual consists of the kitty raiding a rather too-easily accessible sock drawer, obtaining a sock, and dragging it to the middle of my bedroom floor.

My kitty's ritual combines a couple of the most basic magical laws: the law of contagion (the sock is mine and thus psychically linked to me), and the law of evocation (using the right formula, the desired entity can be made to appear).

And ya know--from the cat's perspective, this ritual has worked every single time.

Design (intermission)

[Apologies to humble worm, who thought I was going to tell a story :)

I'm not good at telling stories...]

"I have seen this world as a great howl of pain, I have seen this world as a great ocean of blood..."

Lately I've been thinking a lot about suffering--more than just dead birds and bugs. I should be feeling good--several weeks ago, Teresa and I had the dreaded Conversation about me moving out, and strangely she took it very well. Still, her disease progresses and is scary to watch, and she is diagnosed with other, scarier diseases--yet, childishly, I don't know if it is for her or for me that I mourn when I see an emerald-green dead bird and scoop it off the sidewalk into my coffee cup, put it gently into a planter, on moist soil in the shade...

There's a line of "reasoning" that goes: A decent God would not allow innocent people to suffer. Innocent people suffer. Therefore, there is no God. This syllogism makes so many faulty assumptions, it's hard to know where to begin--so I won't, because it isn't my job here to teach logic to the logically challenged. There's another line of "reasoning" that goes: There is a God. People suffer. Therefore, God wants people to suffer because (it's all part of His plan; they deserve to suffer; they're destined to suffer; suffering is good for you; all of the above). This one makes even less sense than the first one, and both depend for their persuasive force (if any) upon the assumption that matter and spirit are starkly separate, even opposite, categories.

I remember how shocked I was to discover that mind and body, spirit and matter might not be "opposites." This singular cognition occurred 22 years ago due to two college classes, one concerning quantum mechanics and modern philosophy (yes, taught by a real, live physicist, in case members of the Truth Society are reading), and the other in anthropology of religion--we were studying the aboriginal Dream Time. It has taken me ever since to process the mere possibility that I might be a spiritual being having a human experience, that seemingly inert matter might have a conscious substrate, that the abstract truth might, after all, have something to do with what someone had or did not have for dinner.

What has been hardest for me to abandon from that patriarchal, either/or, flesh-damning charnel house of Truth (whether masquerading as Theology, Scientism, or New-ageyness)? Probably the reassurance it whispers: follow the rules, sacrifice your desires, and it will all be all right. The pain you feel is God's intention--you're being purified. Or--it's only neurons firing, grief, love, loss, suffering--merely mental, nothing more. Or--it's all an illusion, brought on by negative vibes.

Reunite spirit and matter and you come face to face with: shit happens.

You might deserve it (or you might not). It might make sense (but it probably won't). You might have been able to avoid it through proper planning and foresight (but don't bet on it). I guess the Grail knight answer lies somewhere between the triad of reductive follies mentioned above, and can be summed up in the (welcome) cliché Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. For me this saying has been a koan--the harder I've tried to wrap my mind around it, the more my mind has warped to fit. Sometimes... I almost believe.

Design, Part II

In the morning: watching my black kitty "play" with a white moth...she's killing it, of course, killing it slowly as its tiny moth ganglia jam up with survival/flight responses, the ancestors of fear. I used to rescue bugs, slugs, and spiders from the cats, and still usually try to save the latter two (slugs are nasty when squished, and I like spiders), but the law of the jungle prevails more and more in the shadow'd halls of the Temple of Doom, as I admit to myself that even bugs make choices and even kitties create karma that they and only they can deal with...even kitties have True Wills, and a cat can't be a cat without killing (pace the Dalai Lama).

[Don't fear, Dear Reader; were I to chance upon you beset by ruffians, I would do all in my power to effect your safe escape...which makes me speciesist, I guess...]

Later that morning: I'm at my alma mater for a professional development workshop, I'm there early, eating in the cafeteria whose glass walls look out onto a garden patio. Thinking about my killer kitty, I can see birds swooping down on bugs, and groundskeepers and custodians preyed upon by the American economy... who/what am I preying upon w/ my blueberry bagel, chocolate pudding, coffee? Juan Valdez, no doubt, still searching for his desaparecida daughter...milk from a cow imprisoned in some hellish factory farm...

...fondly remembering (even as I drink it) this bitter coffee that propelled me so many mornings to academic glory, my radio show, assignations with the Goddess in library stacks or Wiccan circles or greening boughs scattering light and shadow across the bricks of my future...the coffee's awkward bite like a solecism on the lips of one beloved: wrong but in completely the right way.

Going out the door I find an emerald-winged and ermine-throated, very dead bird on the sidewalk, sped towards his future by who knows what predation, finding its fulfillment in false trees and sky of the building's glass facade.

Design, Part I

Years ago, when such jokes were still mainly distributed by photocopy, someone gave me a one-page summary of the spiritual wisdom of the ages, phrased as variations on the adage "Shit Happens." You had stuff like

Zen: What is the sound of shit happening?
Judaism: Why does this shit always happen to us?
Hinduism: This shit has happened before.

As someone who has practiced, studied, deconstructed, obsessed over, rebelled against, recovered from, been transformed by several religions, I found this list hilarious and I treasured it. Even though I organize my belongings by a scheme that could at best be called sedimentary, I'll bet you I could put my finger on this fading photocopy within a couple of minutes.

[Sound of clock ticking.]

It only took about five minutes--it was in an unmarked folder in the file cabinet that houses such items as 20-year-old French fashion magazines; the complete DVD set of Monty Python's Flying Circus; dozens of CDs (Soliloquy for Lilith, Tembang Sunda, Clinkers by Steve Lacy, other obscure stuff); a .45 automatic; a stamped tin box containing a bracelet made from the hair of a long-ago lover; and...actual files--many folders even having titles: Kali; OTO Kundalini Ritual; Taxes; Paris Catacombs; Starrett, Barbara (from back when I was semi-organized--this one contains a photocopy of the classic radical feminist text I Dream In Female)....

anyhow--

here it is, in the unmarked file folder that, oddly, also contains my father's obituary and a copy of Nerval's "El Desdichado" (the one thing here you really should Google, as it applies to what will follow). I'd forgotten these gems:

Protestantism: Let shit happen to someone else.
Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.
Buddhism: If shit happens, it isn't really shit.

And best of all--

Taoism: Shit happens.

Yes, I'm easily entertained. But I love these because they get to the root of what the Buddha identified as the basic spiritual question: why do we suffer?

Test Pattern

I'm working on a good post--honest.

But--damn.

The past several months at my job have turned me into one of the Undead...except without all the chi-chi parties someone like Lestat gets invited to.

So, with the vacation time that has so blessedly fallen into my lap, I've been taking it easy, sitting on my screen porch and listening to birds, spacing out, and not using my higher brain functions too terribly much. (My higher brain is sprained.)

I swear to you the post will appear next week, c. the 25th or 26th. Unless I'm dead, of course, rather than merely undead. By then I will have returned to East Podunk from my family visit to West Podunk, and will be perhaps even somewhat rested (though it is a family visit). I pledge to you, as a purveyor of only the highest quality bloggin', that I am doing all I can to rehabilitate my cerebrum: playing lots of Taipei, exercising, eating chocolate, reading spiritual autobiographies...I am about to start Expecting Adam by Martha Beck.

Bet you never thought you'd see product placements on WiHW...I'm also working on a capsule spiritual autobiography of my own that will be the sequel to the above-mentioned "good post." The good post that will appear next week.

Honest.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

"I read your blog when I want to read something not written by an asshole."
--A Cherish'd Reader

What? It doesn't sound like the highest praise?

I knew what he meant...instant publication begets instant opinion, nearly always idiotic or half-baked. You go on Technorati or somewhere and enter your favorite subject in the search box...see what you get. Likely a liquid-crystal tsunami of insecurities, prejudices, misinformation, knee-jerk speechifyin', and plenty of links to other, similar streams of "thought." Same thing with most e-zines. It isn't that thousands of Internet writers really are assholes (so goes my theory), it's that their writing lacks the polish and self-awareness that--most assholes also lack.

It is probably an example of my obsessiveness and perfectionism (like you need another one!) that, for every post you read on WiHW, at least one other never sees the light of day, residing in digital oblivion until it's deleted from my "Edit posts" folder. Not that the posts laid out before you--like some smorgasbord of devotional confession--confessional devotion??--represent the pinnacle of artistic achievement...

and I don't mean to sound arrogant...

I just don't want my posts to suck.

The fact is, because I'm dealing in this airy realm of spirituality, this intuitive, potentially mucho-BS-freighted area of the unseen and half-heard, of the dreamt and dot-connected-- the burden is on me to provide language that is as concrete as possible. So I have to take the time to subtly shape and shade what I really mean, to craft lies that tell the truth. I don't make stuff up, you understand--

well, Fiorenza didn't say that the POW painter had used ash for paint. (But it made sense in the post: Orpheus and his Beloved fleeing--Hell? Ash? POW? War? Destruction? Ash? The subtext of my own death and rebirth...the phoenix and all that? you get it...) The POW did use a screwdriver as a brush...or my name isn't Kalibhakta.

Well--it's my true name. The name my parents gave me, as much as I like it and as much as it "sounds like" a writer's name or Southern gentleman's name--this legally accepted and "real" name doesn't refer to who I really (think I) am, a child of the Divine Mother. "Kalibhakta" --"Devotee of Kali"--does.

OK.

Wait.

You're saying--that you need to keep it real-- so you make it fake?? "subtly shape and shade"???

Oh, no...this is all real-- I haven't even blogged the most mind-boggling stuff, but don't worry, it's all "authentic," as they love to say in the Ur-fake mass media. It's as real as a bomb-nose camera's image of fall, the instant before oblivion: the explosion rendered as static--it can't explode truthfully, because the camera becomes white-hot fragments as its journey ends...and yes, you gotta admit those smart-bomb cameras don't deliver Panavision...the fake explosions of Hollywood do seem more real... so I guess we can call a blog a docudrama, a Bowling for Columbine or Fog of War to record the fireworks of the heart.

Here to Go

This rings true... I have a commute of a little over an hour each way, and I'm one of that 20 percent grateful for the "Zen time." (Of course, I pay over $200.00 a month for those idyllic gardens of mental sand, another big factor in my planned move...)

When I got my job, I was just glad to have...A Job. The market was grim around that time for People Who Do What I Do, especially if temp gigs in flyover states don't appeal to you. So I'd drive my hour or so and just sit behind the wheel of my noisy little Toyota thinking, "Damn...I have a job. And it's sort of--a real job." I've worked as a day laborer, newsstand stander, night watchman, CD store sneerer (at customers' hunger for Phil Collins and Michael Bolton), medical experiment guinea-pig, retail robot, tech writer, computer trainer (well, I trained people to use them--but same difference), bank gofer, personal assistant to an interior decorator, grocery store price checker, barnacle scraper, and so many more stupid jobs that it seems like I've done almost everything, and What I Do Now is far and away the best.

I actually wake up in the morning and think, excitedly, "Oh, boy! I get to do What I Do today!" Most mornings. Some, I'm just on intra-cranial caffeine drip and a prayer.

Or, actually, a series of prayers, because that's what I use my commute for: communing. With G-d...the Infinite Beyond Conception...Kali...various personifications of the Pleroma...or maybe just an imaginary Friend with a disconcerting knack for significant coincidences. Having this time to center myself on something other than duties, subordinates, superiors, paycheck, leisure fantasies has been one of the most significant factors in whatever spiritual growth I've managed since 1998 and my encounter with my first Teacher.

It didn't start out so grand and noble, this commute. As I've already indicated, it was pretty secular back in the day. I remember one sunny morning spitting water all over myself after I'd had the misfortune to swig from a bottle of Dasani at the precise moment Howard Stern let fly a flavorful bon mot. Fortunately this evolved into me listening to a CD of my guru singing the songs of Ramprasad...I did that for years, and it calmed me, and led me to see Kali in the rising sun, the greening leaves, the silver fog, even the dead animals by the roadside who in their death hosted legions of the living: germs, flies, vultures (ever a symbol of the Divine Mother, for this very reason).

And soon I wanted to sing, so I sang to Her songs from a wondrous cassette called Jai Ma Kirtan. And soon singing wasn't enough, so I poured my heart out to Her, learning that I could say the most trivial, insignificant things and still feel the sun of Her infinite love. Soon I was saying a mantra from my heart chakra, the bija mantra for the heart chakra, and I felt it opening, felt myself prising it open like a safecracker heeding the thuds and clicks to unlock a bright treasure...

and now I give Her myself, my day, my every act...knowing I might re-take these things in selfishness or fear, but knowing, too, that only in the gesture lies the real: excellence is not an act, but a habit. Some mornings I really don't feel like praying. I'm too goddam tired or have too much on my mind, and I'd rather just zone out to a CD or take in the sun-touched, misty scenery. But I know I have to throw myself at the divine--have to stomp the spiritual gas pedal to make escape velocity...and in this steady practice I'm starting to see everything else as Her unfolding.

One day early on, going home, driving through the swamp, I saw all the trees become living flame. The whole world turned to flame in the mantra I was saying. Nothing like it has happened since, but I know I'm kindling myself with every mile, every loving word sent aloft. "Today the world turned to flame," it said in my journal...and so it is now, in the pixels before you that only exist in surging neuronal fires...in the fire of memory, fire of anticipation or doubt...fire of wanting that G-d lights in each of us, wanderlusting us, leading us home.