Saturday, December 22, 2018

Conversations With a Sacred Conch


I'll be wearing a sheet, walking barefoot, looped with leis, and carrying a conch shell up to the stage. That's the plan anyway. The conch -- a prized, and blessed, ceremonial instrument of a local community -- has to be blown to call in the spirits, to cast a sacred spell over the audience, to suspend disbelief, to enter the dream realms of the little drama about Hawaiian traditional ceremonies; and that's what worries me. I'm not much accomplished as a conch caller. But I am willing to try, and have been conversing with the conch. "I don't know if I am worthy," I say. "You are a sacred object," I say. "If you are willing to let this work and ring out a nice, resonant tone, I'll take you up on the invitation to join the spirit of the season." It sits there next to me on the seat of the car, a ceremonial fetish not accustomed to negotiating conditions, keeping mum, its secrets very intact. "Meet me half way," I say. "No, less than half way. I'll meet you, if it's amenable to you." Silence. Beautiful, polished pink silence. "I'm willing," I say.


Tuesday, November 13, 2018

All That You Leave, All That You Find


There comes a morning when you wake up secure in the knowledge, a knowledge deep in the marrow of your bones, that time is running out. As your eyes open and adjust to the stars, you can take the terror of that knowledge and stuff it away, shove it into the shadows where you keep all of the other truths too painful to bear, the ones you don't want to face, or you can let the terror set fire to your psyche and run for the nearest relief, the pain killers of distractions or self-medication, or you can let the knowledge sink in and take shape to form the basis for your actions. Those actions are the ones that lead you into unknown territory, the places you know you need to go before the curtain comes down, if you are strong enough to embrace the hard option. Your destination may be the roof of the world or the art left undone from neglect, but you must rise and leave the comfort of habit behind. The lights won't work for you now because you travel in the dark. That is the way, my friend, but you will find the path and get used to the joy of not knowing, of being again a beginner, of taking the hard road of what is while it lasts. Peace will walk with you if let her and learn how to see her. Light grows behind the ridge in front of you; frost on the road sparkles like diamonds. Time to gather up your staff and pack your bed and rise, rise.

Thursday, October 25, 2018

The Way of Art


So there you are, faced with another of the ongoing conundrums that require your attention. Now. You can fret and just pull the first lever of response out of anger, frustration, and impatience, with no care for the outcome, or you can take a breath and consider the options. The problem, unfortunately, does not have one right, correct, or pre-ordained solution. You have to think on your feet and synthesize. Pull together the middle way rather than being gored on the horns of a dilemma. Try to find some joy in the process. Ultimately, it's about doing the best you can with what you have, hoping, but not expecting the best outcome, all while offering the best of you to the situation: patience, care, mindfulness, craft, skill, and love. You pull up the heretofore unknown solution, or action, in other words, out of yourself. You leave yourself on the field. You give birth to something, whether it is a roof on your shed or colors that pop in your painting. You meet the monsters with bravery in the face of newness and joy in act of giving yourself to right now, even if you go down, or up, in flames.

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Paying My Dues


Snow flies early in New Mexico at seven thousand feet on the high desert. That is what the dark, brooding skies deliver today. The cold bites through my thin Tucson jacket and the wind has the dried sunflowers dancing a swaying conga line as I make my way along the path to my studio. The studio is a pre-fab building with a wood burning stove. I'll stoke the stove so I can paint without freezing in my quiet little cave. I am not a trained painter. I don't really know what I'm doing or even why I'm doing it. I look at "real" painters like I look at real writers and come face to face with the fact that I will never reach that level of achievement. I failed as a writer, having composed over ten books that were never published. That is nothing, a painter friend told me. "The first five thousand paintings are the worst," she said. Aye. But I made more money selling a painting that took me two hours than I did on a book that took me over four years to write. I guess there is no equation for time spent doing something and the compensation one receives for doing the work. I did not write for the money, nor do I paint for money. I do these things because something inside me wants to get out and to touch some other soul. So I listen to the juniper crackle in the stove, watch the snow fly, count my lucky stars to have a moment to stare at a blank canvas before I struggle with the colors this time instead of words.

Monday, October 8, 2018

Waking


I was living in a politically active housing co-op, working in a whole-wheat, granola-eating, spirulina-swilling grocery co-op, and studying European social history with Marxist professors. It was a heady time in Madison, 1977, and I was asked by some women friends to serve as a security person for the first Take Back the Night march I ever joined. So, I, Todd X, and some other long-haired men sympathetic to the burgeoning feminist movement took our places at the back of the march down State Street. Our job was to keep counter-protesters from breaking up the march. I thought it would be easy. It was not. We security guys listened to the stories of rape and abuse over the loud speakers. It was enraging, and made me feel embarrassed to be a man. But when the march got going, things began to heat up. Beefy frat boys drinking on State Street did not like women gathered to even the scales of sexual power. They stopped on the side-walks and heckled, made masturbatory gestures over giant (imagined) phalli, and engaged marchers in shouting matches. For the first time, I was on the receiving end of the male gaze. One of my fellow security guys got into it with one of the hecklers. I had to break it up and stand between them, arms extended. Another of the security guys threw a brick through the window of an adult (porn) bookstore. Cops came. People ran. It was the beginning of a long wake-up call, still going on. My static, little world where I could just stand on the sidelines and let degrading comments about women slide ended. It was my fight too now. I could smell the bridges behind me burning, could see the friendships that had been based on bashing women explode into flame, and I got the hateful look from men who now saw me as a betrayer. Having the curtains that cover misogyny pulled back and seeing the carnage hidden behind it, there was no going home again. 

Friday, September 21, 2018

Writing Hiatus


For anyone paying attention to the progress (or lack thereof) of this blog, I give thanks. I have poured my heart's desires and passion for expression into eight-hundred plus posts for the past four years or so. I have explored and detailed the crucible of the prison writing workshops, recorded my clumsy construction of the New Mexico place, and ranted about how wrong-headed education has become. It's been good for me, and I hope you got something out of it too. Like many undertakings, however, this blog has a life span. I won't say it has been a failure, but it has languished. I don't know exactly why, and why doesn't much matter anyway, but it's time for a break. My energy has ebbed, and I feel a bit defeated by circumstances. I hope to be back soon, but don't know for sure. So hasta la proxima and  quiero que vayan con Dios.

Friday, September 7, 2018

Dying -- and Living -- Well


A study analyzing thousands of obituaries found one word recurring more often by far than any others. That word was "help." Yes, when a measure is taken of a life well-lived, it is the role we played in helping others that counts for more than anything when the final story is told. Of course, that help can come in the form of a discovery, or raising awareness, or working for greater freedom, but it is in helping something larger than one's self that makes for what people remember. If one is to live knowing that, one might shift a priority or two, if dying well matters in the end.*

* From TED talk https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/645360945/lux-narayan-what-do-obituaries-teach-us-about-lives-well-lived

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Where Have All the Teachers Gone?


Paperwork, assessment obsession, "backward design" (appropriately named), scripted lessons. The list goes on. What counts as important in education is the test, the data, the results, and a standard pathway to get those results. Regimentation, one might say. And, for me, it's the loss of teaching, the interaction, the dialogue, the shared humanity, the unplanned, teachable moment, the surprise, the abandoning of the lesson to address something important, the creative problem solving, the collaboration, and relationship one develops when lights are going on that marks the tragedy that is education now. In my particular situation, administrators have taken over the training of graduate teaching assistants. Time is now spent going over curriculum that is drawn from corporate textbooks, assessment and more assessment, and working backwards from the "outcomes." It's a top-down thing now. Grades are the thing. Any agency I had as a teacher and professional development leader, the "grass-roots" of teachers teaching teachers, has been squeezed into an afterthought of optional discussion. Not surprisingly, teachers who can, leave the profession. Burnout and attrition are high. Teacher preparation is low. We all know the litany. But where have they gone, all those lovely, bright lights, those passionate learners, the ones who loved to teach, the ones students loved? Where?

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Exuviation


It starts when you leave the city and its barrage of noise, its assaults on your attention, the mad rush to pull you out and away from yourself. It continues as the days pass and you notice subtle changes in where the sun rises, its passage through the sky, the length of shadows on the floor. You notice that there are four planets visible in the sky, and you see the International Space Station float overhead while the sun sets. You see the Summer Triangle, Cygnus the swan, and you wait for Orion. You see storms form over the tall mountains, watch them grow, see them drop their loads of rain and then vanish. Then you see the grass turn the land green and the sunflowers carpet the valley in yellow. But mostly you listen for the right word, the right image, and you pay homage to patience, precision, method, mindfulness, technique, and craft. You are a disciple now of the wind and sun and winding order of the cosmos, and you try to remember what it was the ones before you kept saying about your place in the order of things, your need to tell a story. You do the work of slotting yourself onto the wheel of noticing, of recording, of taking the infusion of peace and work that is offered to you. And you give thanks.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Traveling By Bike


On the first day, oh lost one, you gave all you had saved up to get over that first big mountain pass. That was good, because after that you had to pay for what you needed with strength you didn't have to easily give away. But you found it, and you did what you had to do. Yours was not the easy way of youth and condition and fitness or of prestige and power and authority or privilege. You couldn't just twist the throttle or step on the gas to get down the road and out of the rain. You couldn't pull rank either or click your fingers and have an Uber give you a ride. You had to push yourself through the sweat and pain. Yes, the body had to work, but the real work was your spirit. That pulled on your wits and heart and kindness. You paid in full with what you had to dredge up from the core of who you really are without the trappings of money and familiarity and an easy pass. It was character that you wanted to live on -- real, honest-to-god character (that and some really expensive camping gear). So you lived through the cramps and the doubts and the vulnerability and the mistakes and the adversities of the days in search of what you are really made. Did you find it? Well it was right there in front of you when all that distracting baggage was wiped off your lenses. It was in the way you responded to what came to you. It was how you met the sore body that wanted to just take the day off every morning after a hard day.You botched a few things, but mostly, you showed up and met situations with humor and good faith. You'll have to live with that and wrap it in a story that takes you from here forward. Like it or not, it's what you got, what you have to work with, what you have to remember. When you see others pushing against the limits of privilege, wealth, social standing, remember what it was like, and extend a hand. 

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Wrapped Up


It is so easy to be here, the northern Midwest. The place is like a an old pair of jeans that has taken on my shape and feels just right. I relax into the language of the place, the values, the buildings, the rusty cars, the polite, blonde barista, the culture. Not surprisingly, a big part of that is how white it is. Affluent too. Clean and mowed and tidy. It's home, I have to say. I could just snuggle down into the comfort of it and sleep for years, decades maybe. I'd likely put on some weight and get a much bigger vehicle. I fit into the stew from which I emerged long ago, dripping with, and imprinted by, my moment, the land, the smells, the colors. Even the flowers comfort me, familiar friends who wave at me in the breeze as I pass. Might as well just roll into the arms of all that makes this place home more than any other, and let it fill me, take me over. It feels sweet to go under, and I let go the need to push further into something other than here. I have grown tired, so tired. This quilt I wrap myself in quiets the coming storm, the one that you can hear deep in the ground, a distant, low thunder. 

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Minnesota Memory


They grow up out of the loamy soil and fill the car. Uncles, now old or gone, are young again, and I hear their voices. They stand with a beer in hand and laugh with their brothers. They don't notice a younger me watching, absorbing, imitating. They talk work and things but stay away from feelings, from talk about love, from fears of what might come next. So-and-so got a new boat; and that new Impala, the '65, has a curvy shape, a wing over the the rear wheel. They say the 350 is the best ever. But there is more going on between the lines. I can see how they love each other but hold back while they lean into the time they have together. There have been wars, a brother lost to alcohol. They are bound to each other. I want to know how to do this thing they are doing, this being a man, so I watch closely. I am nine years old. Their voices fill the car as I drive past the rolling, verdant, fecund hills and waters of Minnesota. This is my homeland, my roots, and the voices are everywhere. I worry that I have not lived up to the job given to me by these men of my past. I worry that somehow I have failed to become the kind of man I was supposed to be. I shake my head and the voices fade back into the ground. I am here, watching and listening and trying to fill out this body that is now much older than they were, back then, showing me how it was done.

Monday, July 16, 2018

Joy Looks Like


Packing up a wet tent as a prayer of gratitude for shelter from the rain. Arriving at a destination you didn't know you had. Finding what you didn't know you were looking for. Seeing pomegranate tea as the color of blood and finding in it a comfort from the cold. Seeing what is right there in front of you and not wanting it to be anything other than what it is. Loving the sound of the word "Lolo." Finding eleven dollars rolled up in the grass on the side of the road. Watching eyes open wide when someone sees what you are doing because that person has been where you are now. Tasting the first sip of a cold beer after a long, hot climb while hearing music that makes you want to sing along. Seeing the bleached bones of a deer and knowing that someday you too will lay that burden down and feeling no fear. Watching emerald water slide over stones that have traveled down to the river from the tops of mountains and knowing the truth of what you will never understand much less be able to say. Saying hello to a friend that you have never met but who has eyes that you fall into. Entering a stretch of road that offers no help while showering you with beauty. Extra black beans on a steaming burrito. Standing up for a break from a butt so sore you wince at the price you pay for pedaling into a future so rich you almost forget the pain.

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Oxbow


Although only eight-thirty in the morning, the sun heats the pavement as swarms of flies hang over the road. There are clouds of them, down here by the river, that I ride through, careful not get one stuck in my eye. I took a wrong turn already and wasted precious strength climbing over a hill that led to a long road into Hell's Canyon, a beautiful place, but not where I am headed. I am on the right road now, the one that climbs first over the Oxbow Dam, then the Brownlee Dam, and finally up the long haul out of the Snake River Canyon that will lead to lunch in Cambridge, Idaho, many miles above.

 

The rivers here are bloodlines, oases, green fingers surrounded by high desert. The hills are so steep they defy any sense of angles of repose. Looking at them, I expect all of the high ground to come sliding down in a tawny massive mess, but they hold firm. Oxbow hosts river rafters, fishermen (and women), speed-boaters, and many others seeking recreation, mostly with some form of motor. 

Oxbow has been a lesson in accommodation. No longer can one just show up at a campground with hopes of registering for tent camping or overflow. Now, one has to reserve a space on-line, navigate the web, plan far in advance. The campground is run by the electric utility company that also runs the hydro-electric generators in the dams. It is all business.

Luckily, some other cyclists had done this and were willing to share the small tent site with extra vagabonds.



Here, space is tight, and the grass is coifed to a crew-cut, and watered daily. Most of the campground is filled with monster RVs, some with cars in tow. They have more stuff stacked up outside under shade and rain structures: refrigerators, TVs, crates of beer, folding chairs, and on and on.

I pitch my little tent right next to the road on a sliver of grass just big enough to hold my sleeping body. Then I share what food I have with some of the other cyclists, many of them "through-riders," riders who are going all the way across the country. They are tough, seasoned, wind-dried. I like them and their stories. Like me, they started touring in the 70s. Unlike me, they did not take a thirty-year hiatus. Unlike me, they likely don't have cramps at night, their quadriceps knotting into a skein from the long climbs of an eighty mile day.

I am the newbie now, the newbie again.

We drink some tequila and talk about the great rivers of the Northwest: the Snake, the Salmon, the biggest of them all,the one that swallows everything flowing west, the Columbia. All of them are our passageways, our meandering companions. And we leave them all at some point to move away from their westward flow.

So today, here, this morning I climb after following the great Snake, out of the depths, and onto the desert ridge, heading east.



Monday, July 9, 2018

Independence Day -- Hamilton, Montana


These are my friends this morning, a day marking the potential woven into independence. They are my comforts when the day yawns, cool with dew, in front of me: my stove and pot full of hot water, my goochie-ultra-extravagant titanium cup, my orange steed ready to carry me down the road, the tent that keeps the rain and bugs outside when I nod off into utter vulnerability in these strange places. There is also the stainless steel water bottle I found in a dumpster, my cushy sleeping pad that carries the weight of my dreams without complaint. Yes, my socks are cold from walking through tall grass wet with morning, and my eyes are those of an old man -- bleary, sunken with age, too little sleep, all but blind to things up close, but sharp still to all that is far away -- but I sit with all these friends while birds sing and the road waits. I do not know what I will see today, who I will meet. All of that is mystery that can only be revealed by the courage to stand, gather my belongings, and move into the unknown. It helps to have friends who say I will help you; you can do this, even if you feel the cold wind of solitude, the driven rain of exposure to the surprise and possibility of traveling alone with friends.


Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Rust. Salt Spray.


Rusted cable, weathered wood, mist, low-ceilinged gray clouds, salt air. We have arrived at the Oregon coast for a respite before completing the final push to Forest Grove and the aging in-laws. I have to confess to a taste for the indulgence of a hotel and the comforts of hot water, clean and comfortable bed, a roof over my head, and a book on my lap. It would be easy to stay here and pass time in a bubble of creature comfort. Time passes either way. I am hoping that days spent pedaling a bike over mountains will jump-start some sleeping part of myself. That part is he who will inform the rest of my life. I hope to meet him soon, but know that he doesn’t often come around places like comfy hotels on the beach, though he might appreciate a brew at the place down the hill. What will he talk about, this weather-beaten stranger who answered the call to go out into the wind, to take a chance on losing, to accept the consequences of freedom? 

Monday, June 11, 2018

Grimy Patina


It's been a few days. Six or seven, I think. In that short time they have acquired a kind of travel sheen from the dust and wind and occasional use as a towel for my wet hands. They don't seem to mind the neglect or abuse. They are holding my wallet, phone, knife, and keys on this road/camping trip along the California Sierras and Oregon Cascades. They are my summer work shorts, some Carhartts long in the tooth and frayed around the edges, and I have been wearing them every day of this little road trip. I don't know what it is about traveling like this that makes changing clothes seem so unnecessary. I just wear the same shirt and shorts for days on end, not minding the glowing grime. They don't seem to mind either. They seem happy and smile with a shine polished from use and protecting this body from sun, rocks. They keep what I need in place so I can enjoy the view, my mind almost as empty as the day I was born.


Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Day One


As I drive to Gallup for provisions before I head up to campground, I feel pretty green at this. "This," is the life of summer: making it up as I go along, spending most of my days outside, living on less comfort and more exposure to sun and rain.

So, what does a sixty-one-year-old man think about when he finds himself free from the responsibilities of gainful work and house-holding? Mostly, this one considers his shortcomings; he broods on regrets, on paths not taken, work left undone.

But then, my love of being out from under a roof kicks in, and I remember what is was like to delight in just rolling along through the trees, under the sun, in the wind. The feeling of being dead, the paralysis that has taken over my body, and the dull ache of not having done what I set out to do fades.

I see that I have a chair, food, stove, and primitive shelter, and I am grateful.

The first thing I do is set out on a trail I don't know and get lost. I am in the Zuni Mountains above Gallup. They are a big range, forty miles by sixty in the shape a big football. The Continental Divide Trail runs through here. The forest is immense and has hundreds of miles of trails and fire roads. There are mountain lions and bears up here. You can get lost for days. I decided to follow a trail that climbs out of Milk Ranch Canyon. It starts about five miles from my campsite, and I rode down the narrow highway between McGaffey and Fort Wingate to get there. Descending the road meant climbing back to camp.

I didn't know what I was getting into. I had about an hour's worth of water, no food, no rain jacket, no spare tube, no map, no phone, and I had no idea where the trail would end up, though I hoped it would lead back toward the campground.

I went, partly out of impulse, partly out of a need to cut the cord tying me to too much ennui, and partly out a need to attend mindfully to what is happening right here in front of me.

Twisty, packed single-track mixed with rocky outcrops and naked limestone stream beds made for some serious grist, which I had to grind up as I turned my attention to here and now in order to enjoy, and to keep from crashing or flying over the bars.

Up here, no one knew where I was and no one would know for at least a few days. I was incommunicado and out of touch. There was not one person who could have predicted I might take this trail, a trail which is not on any maps or in any of my plans.

Perfect, in other words.

Dark gray clouds began to blow over and a little rain fell. After two-and-a-half hours of hard climbing, I wondered if I should turn around. I had enough reserves of energy stored in my body to ride for several more hours, even though I had no food, but I was running on fumes in terms of water. The climbing forced me to stop, lean over the bars, and gasp for breath. I made a promise to myself to prepare better for the next foray into unknown territory.

Just as I was getting concerned, after almost four hours and sixteen miles of hard riding, the trail dumped out into one that I knew. I was only about four miles from water, food, a chair and cold beer.

Not bad for a first day.


Sunday, May 27, 2018

A Dangerous Question


"In it to win it," announces the bumper sticker  that is right next to the "Viet Nam veteran and proud of it" sticker that is below the monster of an American flag attached to a tall pole so that it will loudly fly from the back of a jacked-up pick-up. This giant of a vehicle could serve a whole village of peasants in Viet Nam, the place and conflict at issue here. I have to think about the mismatch of material wealth and military might between us and them. Just what were we trying to win there? And was that cause worth all the death that we acknowledge on this day of remembering, Memorial Day? Weren't the Vietnamese trying to achieve what we achieved when we revolted from England in our own revolution? Weren't they just trying to make possible a better life with more food, better homes for their children, a taste of comfort? And why were we so set on meeting that desire with immense violence and huge casualties? Today, as I honor those who have died fighting for the goals of a very wealthy, powerful, and, sometimes, unwise, nation, I have to question whether or not our ends are blind to the humanity we hold in the cross hairs, finger on the trigger.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

The System


Whether or not it matters depends on where you stand. If you're under the wheels, you definitely care about the weight of the money machine. If you're driving, what the heck? It's just scenery. Privilege is like that. Comfort is directly correlated to your need to speak up. That's why you have to get up and walk out. If you don't you'll become another zombie staring at the screen. Nobody is forcing you, but the call to creature comforts and the dopamine delivered when someone likes your stuff in that virtual prison can blind you to what's actually going on. They don't want you to see that or to think out of the box too much. That's why they chant that this is all there is; so sit down, drink your beer, and shut out the nattering questions that some hungry part of you wants to answer. But going after the answers might hurt. So get ready for the real deal if you turn your ear to the voices calling you to the work waiting for you, that thing called justice, or recognizing that the "they" down there beneath the wheels is you. 

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Distillation


As the defining features of my identity -- place, work, people, routine, physical strength, mental acuity, and "stuff" -- dissolve and disappear in the rear view mirror, I have to wonder what it is I can hang onto. (Simone the cat is not happy about the new arrangements, but I want her to come along for the ride.) What I find is simple, and, to some minds, a tad trite. The first truth I find is that all I have is right now, the present moment. (This has enormous implications if you think about it. Everything that is past -- all the habits, the stories, the noise, and self-imposed limitations -- do not really exist unless I buy into them.  And, yes, the past is persistent, and,as Faulkner says, it isn't "dead." Old habits die hard.) The second is that the highest state of being is joy. The third is that I know I have to act on what I believe, and that doing so requires that I dig so deep into my courage that I can escape the gravitational pull of fear. So, today as the all that is familiar slips over some past horizon, I carry on, one breath at a time.I have to see a way through and around the habits, the old clothes that I no longer need or want, find the joke in whatever situations present, lift my heavy body, and rise to make a difference.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Clear Head. Good Day.


You won't be getting out of town today as planned. The plumbing done sprung a leak and the the hours required to fix same left you undone with time up. Oh well... That's the way it goes sometimes, maybe all the time. So the day that would have had you on the road and out of Tuc has you here trying to make sense of the list of chores and responsibilities. Where did all these things come from, anyway? Food, phone bills, mortgage payments, transportation, medical stuff, gear for just in case, and the chance to touch a still-hot dream all have you booked and giggling. Damn it's been an interesting run. Broken Achilles tendon two years ago, pneumonia too, dead father, dead mother, dying career, foggy brain, broken heart. What a ride. The day is young, chico. You'll be on the road tomorrow, Gob willing. Seal the deal today and leave it all on the field of deep blue secrets. The lighter the load, the further you'll travel.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Smaller Comforts


You know it is coming and you try like hell to get ready, to trim it down. The load that is. You are clawing your way to the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy: bare necessities. You will take a sleeping bag, a pad, some kind of primitive shelter, a tiny stove and cup, and enough clothes to keep you from freezing when the wind blows and the rains come down without mercy or regard for what the hell it is you want. You know that you will miss the recliner, the TV, pillows, hot showers, cold beer, and the security of a house. But you move toward the brink anyway. You force yourself to plan, to pack, to set in motion the conditions that will launch you off into what you don't quite know or understand. All you know is that your comforts will diminish to the degree that you invite contact. Contact. Wind. Sun. Stars. The road. Undeniable concrete need will come rushing in and you see how much you want to carry on while trying not to snivel. (Okay... while trying not to snivel too much...) You have to discern the difference between luxury and need. You have to quiet the voices of want and envy. You can turn toward gratitude for what you carry. At least you have the small comforts, you say, a fine boundary between you and the live, naked wire of what is.

Monday, May 14, 2018

For Those Who Do the Work


He is darkened by days working under the Arizona sun. His skin is also powdered by fine dust. In his hair, there are mesquite leaves, palo verde blossoms, and pollen from all the flowers of late spring. He is on tip-toe, on the top step of a ladder, wielding a chainsaw, trimming trees. The trees are scattered tastefully throughout the parking lot of a shopping mall that caters to the wealthy part of town, the foothills. Mercedes, BMWs, Land Rovers, and other luxury cars pull up to the coffee shops for their expensive drinks. Drivers sit behind tinted windows in air-conditioned comfort. They smell like after-shave and body wash. They are worried and have problems of their own. He sees that in their faces as they drive by and he knows the day is young, that he has hours to go before he can rest, get home to his family. He will take the bus to the other part of town, where there are many like him who travel to the big houses to clean, trim, sweep, haul, attend to the needs and comforts of those who have so much they have forgotten, lost contact. They will complain about him, find fault with his work, threaten to fire him if he asks for more, for fairness. The trees will look good because of him. He notices how the trees grow, and he trims them in ways that will allow them to heal quickly. Like a surgeon, he cuts cleanly at the bark collar, the place where growth is most vigorous. He sees a truth in ordinary movements, in the cycles of the day. He thinks about his children and leans into the work of being a better man, father, companion, human being. He does the work of noticing, of being mindful of his actions, his thoughts, what it is he is called to do. Without him, these branches would die and crack and litter the holy ground of those who pull the strings, those who take home the chips in a rigged game.

Saturday, May 12, 2018

Open Letter To Chuck Bowden




Dear Mr. Bowden –

You likely did not remember me as you slipped away from those of us who remain. We met once or twice and talked a bit about writing. You read some of my work and called it weak and wordy. I didn’t disagree.

But I knew you from your words. A man or woman can find comfort and friendship and kindred spirit in the words of someone else. That’s what I found in your writing. Stubborn love. Love of sun, wind, freedom, possibility born of emptiness. I saw you.

For one thing, you stared.  You saw the open, empty, shimmering expanse of desert for what it was: a reminder of nothing. In that you had some sparse company, but more than you may have known.

You wrote from direct, lived, sometimes harsh experience. You were not a writer of abstraction, though there is much to admire in your ideas. You were one of the few writers who did not turn their backs on unpleasant facts, and, like a good firefighter, you ran toward the flames of them.

Instead of writing an abstract argument about migration through the Sonoran Desert, you and Bill Broyles, in your essay “Blue,” got blisters walking – in June – through the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. Your account, told in the clipped prose of the seasoned journalist, brought the harsh beauty to light. “Everything is blue,” you wrote, “luminously blue.” You ruminated on aches, on physical decline, lost love, mortality, and the cold finality of dehydration where there is no back-up plan. You saw the steel walls, what we academics call the “militarization” of the border, but you dodged the trap of well-trodden arguments, the loops of the ideologues. You walked where others had died, through a land of shadows, in the company of bats, owls, nighthawks. You put yourself there and you listened, observed, felt, imagined. You got thirsty, sore, and hungry. You got a taste of what it is to walk oneself to an end with no way out, no way home.

That was a theme, that no-way-home thing, the edgy domain of a mind strong enough to entertain brutal and beautiful reality. Yours was the role of the kick-starter, cage rattler, alarm bell. You called us to wake up to streets on fire, to lives hanging in the balance. If it were you, your work said, you would want someone to tell the story, to record, to broadcast the urgency to do something.

I wanted you to take a side, to be one of us who lobbied on behalf of refugees for sanctuary, but you stuck to your independent, curmudgeonly guns. “I have no interest in Central America,” you said.

I see that. It was not your way. Yours was the way of action, movement, names of places – Tacna, Lechuguilla, Tule – and people, always people, unguarded, unpolished.

You were no bleeding heart, no hand-wringing potted plant.  

Your nature was not the Emersonian, benevolent, healing eyeball, but one that could and would hurt you. You courted that and lived with a rattlesnake you named Beulah in “Snaketime”. You kept her, like some of your demons, close enough to goad you on, close enough to keep an eye on, like one’s enemies, because it was peace you wanted. Even if she was dangerous, her life was worth the risk. Her presence brought you some relief from the abundant sorrows of hot, dry, indifferent places and wounded hearts.

You did not come in from the light or sun or heat, but pulled down your hat, refilled your glass, that always ready glass, and turned your eyes to what mattered, what needed to be said, even if some didn’t want you to say it, or others didn’t want to hear it.

You brought us the news. You did. You bore witness. That unvarnished honesty felt cruel sometimes, but I saw between the words a deep and abiding love. Yours was not the un-crafted, irate rant of knee-jerk outrage, but the study of how to make shadows beautiful. You put forward the best of your words, the ones drawn from up from the cold, deep well of caring. You paid the price for not looking away, taking the easy path.

So, thank you for your damnable persistence, your gift for precision -- for the right names for things – for the vivid, hard-to-swallow, and impossible-to-digest, truth.  

Yours,
Erec

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Air Pockets, Sick Sacks, and Barrel Rolls


Big cumulonimbi up ahead. Better fasten the seat belts, Buckwheat; we're heading in. We're likely to roll over a few times when the big ones hit. Hatches closed, sails reefed, lines stowed. Try to remember a time when you were not afraid and hang onto that. Fill that out with sights, sounds, and smells: the shadow on the wall as you rode your bike along a wall in the rising sun, a carpet of yellow petals from the palo verde trees, the wafting scents of citrus blossoms. It was good, that first morning of freedom.

Monday, May 7, 2018

Eight Hundred


With this entry, I tally up 800 blog posts. That, for most of you, is of little interest and not an occasion worth noting. For me, however, it marks not only a nice round number but also a turning point from my life as a teacher to what I still don't know. I hope that I will become more of a writer, now free from the burdens that go along with gainful employment. I'll be hungrier, so that should stimulate some desert-inspired lunacy. Likely I will still wake up at 4:30, claw my way to First Coffee, mull over the bony grist of my life, and then launch off on whatever it is that seems worth saying. For those of you still listening, I thank you. Here's to the next 800, God willing. May they tell a little story or two about love, life, and testify to the magic of the word. Cheers!

Not Yet Done


The ruins of your past lay smoking in the rear view mirror as you are carried away into the next chapter of your life. You feel done with all that, but you know you are not. And you don't know for sure how to frame it all. You could call it a disaster. After all, you didn't publish the book that you called your life's work. You didn't even clean out your office or have a party to mark the passing from one life to the next. But that is only one way to look at what is now over. Another is that all those mistakes and misfortunes have gotten you to where you are and where you are is just that. Your heart has been broken, yes, but broken open again and again. The feast of losses has only served to help you see the roiling current in which you swim. So gather up the gems and toss out the trash and dry your tears old man. The transformations have not yet ended, and you have no idea of who you are yet to become any more than the water creature swimming there in the murk knows that it will soon sprout wings, take to the wind, and call himself dragonfly.

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Connected


Your phone won't take the photo you want it to take and then deletes the one you did. It teases and rebels right there in the palm of your hand. The frustration of that is, in part, the phone, but you know that emotions have a way of sending down deep roots into the still teeming, hot, glowing lava of unfinished business with your unhealed wounds. That's a hard one to admit, you have to admit. But the times you walked away to end it didn't end it. Rather you pushed it down into some deeper soil of the psyche. "The past is never dead," wrote one Mr. Faulkner. "It isn't even past." So when the kitchen gets too hot, and the molten emotions bubble to the surface because your phone is a miscreant agent of electron evil, remember that the real demons snapping at your heels are the ones than never healed. The news you don't want to hear is that you have to turn and face them. That, or forfeit the freedom that comes only from knowing you did what you had to do. A phone, then, will be just a phone, and you start to get the joke. 

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

On This Our Last Day


Dear Young People --

On this, our last day together, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for playing along, for your openness to learning, for putting away your phones (most of the time), for asking questions when you did not understand, for the quizzical looks when you were thinking particularly hard about something.

And I want to ask that you take your words seriously. How you talk to yourself and others makes a difference in the quality of the world. I know that sounds odd and typically weird coming from me, but your words may just be the most important tool you use as you imagine your way into the rest of your life. They give the first form to what is possible; you have to be able to say something before you can reach for it. I want you to say to yourself the deepest desire of what you want to do with your life, to say it without fear that you won't attain it, without belief that you are not worthy of it.

In other words, dream big and then plot your path with your words, thoughts, and actions. With those three things, you can do whatever you want. And you might just love doing what you do. That's very important, that love thing. Words infused with love are unstoppable. That's a secret that doesn't get shared very much.

So thank you for your time, patience, and, above all, willingness to suspend the familiar to consider something never before created: the surprise of finding out more about yourself than you knew before.

Good work.

Keep it up,

E.Toso

The Spaces Between


They come and go, these crazy fires of desire. The latest one burns for a tiny-house truck camper or teardrop trailer. I so want out of here and to hit the road that I can't sleep at night. I know I am running away. But the fantasies are so real I can move into them until my "real world" comes charging through the veil of my day dream. Getting the house cleaned up and rented, papers graded, reports evaluated, prison business tied up, all nag at me. I can't wait to get back to my visions of deep, red, breathing canyons that whisper with seeps of life-sustaining water, the water of what might be in some other land, some other life.

Monday, April 30, 2018

Last Tango


They were not the usual contents of the big recycle bin used by our modest little community. Unopened boxes of expensive adventure gear lay scattered amid the cans, jars, cardboard, and assorted paper products. Shining blue anodized aluminum tubing caught my eye. Brand new snow shoes, still in the box. Beneath them, an unused, full-body wet-suit lay crumpled ignominiously next to a milk carton. A high-end sleeping bag was under the wet-suit. Treasures mixed with trash, a mother lode for the scrounger. My neighbor must be cleaning out his stash of adventure gear, I thought. He's realized he's old and it ain't gonna happen: all those dreams of surfing, red-rock camping, and rough-country road tripping are going to forever stay in a lock box of intentions that he will keep under his bed, but never actually realize. Like him, I am looking at a future much more limited than what I am used to, but I extracted the snow shoes from the dumpster, then the sleeping bag and wet-suit. I'm not ready to toss in the towel just yet. I have a swan song summer on the horizon.

Saturday, April 28, 2018

Play It Again, Sam


Once, a while back, when I was in a particularly dark funk, a friend asked me whether or not I had any heroes. I thought for a long moment before saying that I only saw heroism in those who grew beyond themselves and their egos. Those rare souls saw themselves as connected to something larger, and, often took some action to remedy social ills. They found joy in service. One of those diamonds was Sam Hamill -- a voice, a poet of pain, a witness to the glowing heartbreak of of love and politics. Here was the remedy to a toxic masculinity, an ex-Marine who learned the vocabulary of emotion, an ex-inmate healing the trauma of rape, a heroin addict who swapped his need for a fix for a love of words, a teacher who asked his students to open forbidden doors by living as example. His essay, "The Necessity to Speak," became a kind of manifesto for my writing life. The only kind of writing that interested me was writing that rose above technical prowess into a dangerous truth that most people did not want to hear. Speaking this kind of truth to power can get you killed in many places on the planet, but it is what needs to be done, is waiting there in the wings for someone brave and committed enough to say it. I am still working on that. Today is sad. I am grateful, though, for the words that remain. Adios, Sam. I'm still listening.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Ah, Sweet Summers in the Southwest


First Sonoran Summer -- you know -- the dry, hot season of May and June, tightens its grip on more and more of April. (Second Summer begins with the monsoons, sometime in July, usually.) At first it was just the heat of high afternoon, the one-to-five-o'clock window, that felt like a convection oven. But now the heat spreads across the day,  stretching from late morning to early evening, and my bike rides to work or home have become summer sweat-fests. Wildfires have already begun to blacken the skies. Open camp fires? Forget it. Get ready for one-fifteen. This, friends, is what separates the weenies from the wusses. We wusses abandon Tucson and run north. The crazy weenies stay here and complain to those of us at higher latitudes and altitudes. Sometimes I wish I were young enough to enjoy this free sauna, but other times it's okay to have entered late mid-life, that time when horizons close in, when the not so gradual decline of tolerance of dehydration and heat exhaustion makes hiking a kind of Russian Roulette. Too bad there are no spare parts yet for all the body pieces that could use a refresh, a cold shot of hail, a taste of ozone after a bolt of lightning. Just so you know, Second Summer, I won't be offended if you arrive early and stay late.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Dues


Honing the work doesn't happen without contact with a grinding stone. In this case, the stone offers a clear look at how far you still have to travel. You want the work to be done. You are tired. Bone tired. So tired you can't get up. You have to get up. You have to lift your tools and get to work. The forces weighing you down are great, but this is the final push, and the line you are about to cross is where the real work begins.

Monday, April 23, 2018

Life Line


Unlike the others out there doing what it is you are trying to do, you do not have the entourage of guidance: the faculty support, connections to the publishing world, friendly editors who have groomed and polished your work to a high shine. Yours is more the path of the the underdog, with good hearts giving you a pat on the back as you lumber past through the tangle of confusion and thick underbrush. Although it feels that way, you are not alone. You just did not get the easy pass in this life. You have to learn to ask for and accept help in whatever form it comes. The life line is there, but you have to pick it up and throw it out. Whether or not someone finds it is another story.

Sunday, April 22, 2018

Could Have Been Worse


It rests there: a smoking, wrecked ruin. But you are there to see it, at least. You think you should care a bit more that it crashed and burned, but you are so tired that you can't think about it, much less feel anything yet. Before this result, you actually thought it might work, magical thinking that you have been so good at. You didn't listen to the voices that told you how wrong you were in your hopes. You trusted that, somehow, it would turn out, that you would find the reciprocity you imagined. Oh well... you did what you could. Your mistake was that you never learned how to dance left-footed, legally blind, almost deaf, one hand tied behind your back. 

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Introversion to Distress


Without people, there would be nothing to reel me in from my musing. By people, I mean obligations, responsibilities -- extrinsic reasons for leaving the land of freely-associated ruminations. I would  linger here in my introversion like a balloon batted around by air currents. Of course, if there were no people, I'd have to do my own digging of roots and stalking of mastodons to survive. Ruminating is a kind of civilized luxury, an act possible because of discretionary time and resources. So, I guess I should grateful when pulled out of my thoughts by what it is I need to do to teach, to earn my three hots and flop. But time, sweet time. Without it, I am paralyzed by lack. With it, I paralyzed by possibility. 

Livin' By the Laws


So, my dear, tired wanderer, you are sad about how things have turned out. That is one way to respond to how you have been perceived by others. And you know that the key to the future rests in aligning your hands, your heart, your mind, with your actions. Your actions. Actions, you must remember, work the alchemical laws of how your life will proceed from here. The veil in front of you, keeping you from creating the life you want, can be pierced only by courage, love, and passion made visible by what you do. It is the way of things. You must calm your fears, quiet the voices that say no, find your serene, vibrant source that does not fear death, place your foot firmly on the base of that foundation, and then take that first step. If you can breathe, you will soon find yourself running, and the world will swirl around you, now a cascading river of light.