I shut off vidchat and then I need to get right with myself, so uncharacteristically (anymore) I go for a walk around the block.
It’s a breezy, cool, bright late afternoon. The sun is tinting everything with that orange-ing light that makes every passing car an expressionist painting; every front-yard conversation a tableau.
It is Spring, or what passes for it in Southwest Florida, and the sap is rising. Indoors I didn’t notice it so much. Out here, it’s unmistakable: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower is charging itself up again.
And like a diver I want to get lost in these perceptions, these sensations. Even as my everyday mind slows and descends towards some gentle, ambulatory calm, the voiceless, connected part of me — Spirit, maybe — rises up to meet her.
Changing the whole world into subtlety.
Slowly walking by houses that have time to make my acquaintance, now that I’m not flying by at vehicular speed, I see details of my neighborhood which may as well not have existed until this moment: my life passes them so fast, I would never have been able to tell. For instance, who knew that here, one block over from my house, are emplaced these perfectly self-contained koi ponds and tall, waving papaya? There, from over on the corner, a mother calls her child in for supper and the child calls back. It’s a timeless familial ritual. And it’s all in Spanish.
Between two other yards, talking over the low fence, there are two bulbous Black ladies each in those 2 for $20 stretch-cotton sun dresses the corner pharmacy sells. They nonetheless compliment each other on their nails or their wigs or that crazy thing the one of them said at that get-together the other night. My ears take in the tones as thirstily as my eyes would take in a sunset. The passion and the tone and the palette of their expressions; the different hues and warmths of them, are performance art; they put repressed, fearful white-folk talk to shame.
Though I am suddenly reminded of how much I enjoy the cultural immersion of hanging out at my Alma Mater’s library, half the time just to hear all the brilliant smooth-palefaces passionately swapping both slang and ideas until the very conditioned air seems filled with pure flocks of their youthful patois.
I have not fired a gun in months now and Facebook tells me I crashed that Philanthropists’ ball a year ago. How can that be?
There are supposed to be shortcuts to this state. There are supposed to be trainings and hobbies that condition Awareness. There are meant to be friend groups that call me back to this; that haul me back into the deep when my life has got all surface: wave-choppy and meaningless.
I used to do hypnosis, down here deep at this level.
These are the depths I used to hide in, when my childhood life got too bullshit to handle; up on its surface levels, at least.
This is the heavy level at which I intook books like nourishing broth; at which my soul fed. When my body would sit for hours staring at cover art for a beloved fantasy or science fiction story, it was because my mind had dove into awe, low down here.
A little older, and this connective level is the one at which I used to share my body with another; plugged direct into Creative Spirit to make from nothing, love. (It is a beautiful thing that this braiding-together can become the selfsame life-generative act.)
At the end of the block I walk into and all through and back out our local grocery store. I take pictures of “anthropomorphic mascots” for some homework. But the framing of objects into pictures with my camera becomes a connective, artistic act, too.
“The reason I won’t sell you drugs,” said my friend who was a dealer on campus, “is because the rest of us take drugs to see the world the way you see it everyday.”
* * * * *
This is the Me who Used to Be.
This is the Self that my Poet Protégée accused me of betraying, when I chose to pursue housebuying etc. instead of pursuing my Art.
I’m still here. I’m still, here. Whenever I get time and aloneness sufficient to sink down and withdraw inward and see the world from my quiet center. Which is to say: whenever all of my tenants’ needs are quiescent and I’m not on call and there’s no deadline or bill due date looming to cause me to spin back up into surface chop, out of fear.
Which is to say: exactly never.
* * * * *
I have brightly colored fadeproof pigments in jewel colors tingalinging in their cardboard cage within my room; they call to me like tiny nymphish sirens. I have down-soft brushes and
I have a universe of ideas down here; myths and images, colors and moods, that arise voiceless to grace the page only when I have the time to sink to meet them.
Which lately is exactly never.
* * * * *
Christmas is my favorite holiday because the whole world is grateful for itself, and all of us for each other. It feels for a month like I feel in this state, at this depth, everyday — everyday I’m freed to come inhabit it…if only briefly.
To hold visiting hours with myself.
* * * * *
People in grief come here.
People in catastrophic loss.
Artists come here.
Lovers of nature, Spirit, and meditation do.
Those who can push Ego aside like a curtain covering a window,
and See.
* * * * *
It is based in this authentic quiet that I feel I can see and truly be seen.
I have wanted all my life to belong; to be enough. So that all striving can stop, and I can take my place amongst…whatever group it is that sees the world and each other this way.
The more I can be in this place in myself, act from it; the more I can find them.
I’m starting to find them.
* * * * *
The Professor of the Roof brunching with me this noon and telling me of his pure research sabbatical in Georgia where he is modeling pure numbers directly.
The Professor Who Was a Street Clown making his career regard metaphysical realities and how creative young minds are translating those into Art.
The Kingmaker conducting an orchestra from intuitive knowledge of the nature of systems of people; concerning himself and his social engineering ability entirely on how to bend all those systems towards world-changing Good.
And the Physics guy getting lost real good on the weekends, on stage, in his practice room, in pure upright bass, man. Every Wednesday night in central Sarasota. Come on over; get up to get dowwwwn.
* * * * *
My business school does not have purists like this. Everyone there is a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy of someone who knew what the trend was, back when that knowledge was relevant.
As the Kid told me recently, my burnout of late is because everything I’m doing is enroute to a thing that feeds my soul. None of these fruitless activities actually do.
* * * * *
But walking around the block does.
When I’m too amped-up by the surface churn, I forget.
* * * * *
Why write this today? Here is the cat on my lap, and still a million forward-moving things I should be doing; time management I should be ratcheting down within an inch of its — or my — narrow little life….
Yet here I type. Regarding college-kid patois and orange-tinted tableaux.
Because this is the level at which I’ll save this business.
This is the level of imagination from which I can envision what these houses should be.
And from that envisionment, they — and I, and all of us — will take on new life.
* * * * *
I took a walk because I had let down my overseas counterpart. From his vantage my choice is easy. He is frustrated I am making the wrong one.
From my vantage, all I long for is the state he was born in:
Freedom from fear.
A family to support me, healthcare to repair me, sufficient internal resources to believe I’m worth pursuing my dreams, sufficient outside resources to express my highest creative self.
This past year I touched Belongingness. I started finally finding whole cohorts of sufficiently cultured and authentic and self-expressing people; ones who at long last resonated healthily with my inner me.
And they’re changing the world. For Good.
* * * * *
And then my bullshit Xerox-copy responsibilities yanked me up to the choppy surface again and it’s been a year and I want to weep.
* * * * *
But this frantic lady running from herself wants to take on all this flotsam at the surface and explode it all into nothingness for me. She is all action, no reflection. She will Never Stop.
Good.
Her freneticism fighting chop with chop can free me to go pearl-diving beneath it all again; can buy me freedom to sink deep and bring us all back up treasures and wisdom.
* * * * *
This all was supposed to be a surrogate, you see. Each piece patching old wounds, or acting as analogy to research my Wiser Self needed, to be satisfied.
The families I build replace the family that was never built for me. The people I save replace my siblings and parents, whom I could not save. The traumatized veterans I study and whose stories I hear, stand in for studying my own trauma and corroborating my own story.
Men at war gain national interest and get research on themselves funded. Money gets set aside for them. Solutions and restorations are found for them.
Whereas silent, beneath, I slip some of those magic healing solutions down here with me.
The trick is they work just as well on women and our trauma;
the secret is that women happen to be people too.
* * * * *
Don’t forget every practice, every discipline, every body of knowledge, came from direct quiet observation, initially.
We all have everything we need to navigate the world, deep inside us.
Conniving forces outside us benefit if we forget this.
Don’t ever forget this.
* * * * *
The fading, ashing, burning-out is not exactly from not doing The Thing Itself.
I have not been The Thing Itself.
Not been MY Self.
* * * * *
Understanding that; reorienting towards that.
All the bullshit excuses fall away and the order of operations to get good again becomes clear.