Durango Dreamin'

I am standing on a corner in Gallup (not Winslow). I have in my grocery bag a nice slice of Gouda cheese ($9.95), some pita chips ($4.50) and an add-shot Starbuck's red-eye ($3.00). Ah, but what is money when the soul is on a quest?

People stare from  the interiors of their dusty pick-ups, paint oxidized Nissans, and sway-backed mini vans. They likely wonder what the hell some old guy in a tie-dyed shirt, sandals, and bike messenger bag is doing holding down the curb in between Home Depot, Wal Mart, and Big Lots.

Only yuppies bound for Colorado are driving Subarus. Those Subies have racks with nice bikes, kayaks, cargo carriers full of climbing gear. They are the horses of my tribe, the means to the end of natural beauty seen through the eyes of endurance challenge. They are going by too fast to notice the incongruity of a stranded traveler on foot at a crossroads where cars rule.

My Suby is busted, in the shop, due soon for open heart short block, crank-case work.

In the meantime I wait for the pedestrian walk light that never comes. I can see a faint trace of a crosswalk that leads to nowhere on the other side of the six-lane road. Not many people seem to walk around here. When I do finally get a walk light, several trucks have to swerve to avoid me, never having before encountered a pedestrian.

What is it about this crossroads? It has to be one of the most God-forsaken strip malls on the planet. Franchises and corporate marketing hype rule. It's windy and dusty and only a few hardscrabble grasses poke their heads up out of the cracks. Ravens play on the wind.

Last year, at this very same place, I lost my wallet. Now, joining the ranks of street people is something I recommend from time to time, if for no other reason than to see there is scant padding between them and us, the busy, lucky ones.

I cannot hide my yuppiness on this corner, nor can I fully justify my reasons for being here.

Tomorrow morning, if I make it, I will ride from Durango to Silverton on my skinny-tired bike. The ride is a kind John Henry re-match, only we will be on bikes, racing the steam engine. We will ascend to almost 11,000 feet over two passes, Coal Bank, and Molas. I will do it on about four hours of sleep in three days. But that is the way a spiritual quest is supposed to go.

I have been training for six months. Hours of slogging up Mount Lemmon, near Tucson, rides in the Gila Wilderness near Silver City New Mexico, and fantasy-filled commutes to work. 

The Iron Horse is one of the first items on my bucket list, that collection of things to live before I die. I am paying quite the price to get there, and others are helping me along with superhuman kindness and generosity.

Kate Brown, God bless her, has loaned me her truck. True, it needs brakes to be safe on the steep mountain grades between me and Durango, but it is transportation, the difference between making it and not. Strangers too, when they see me busted on the side of the road, have been kind, especially the folk in Zuni at the 24-hour Quick Stop. Friends have sent sympathetic texts that rain down sporadically when I find the rare cell phone hot spot. The Meeg-a-Beeg has given her blessing to my crazy pilgrimage. The gods are smiling.

I want to do this thing. And I am obligated by karmic debt to enjoy it, soak it in, remember it for the stories to come.

Andale! To the moon rising over the mountain ridge, the shriek of the steam engine as it leaves the station, the cold, long slog over Molas Pass, and wicked descent into Silverton. If this is a dream, let it continue. I never want to wake up. 

What to do About Simone -- A Cat Koan*

My cat, Simone, sees things that I don't. She swipes at the air and leaps after phantoms just out of her reach. Sometimes she reaches under something that is totally invisible, curling her paw beneath an imaginary cabinet or sofa, like a mime creating the object, wall, or window that is not there.

I wonder if she is cat-crazy. Or if I am just too stuck in material carnality to perceive that which is more subtle than the here-and-now, beefy, luggish, concrete. She is a smart cat.

She might have access to colors I don't see, to sounds too high or low for my ears to detect, to touch so sensitive it perceives temperatures or pressure or heat or cold out of my range of noticing.

If I had to infer what she is looking for, it might be her brother who died a while back. He may be reaching for her from the other side of something I don't understand. Sometimes I see him, and others who are no longer here, in dreams. Simone might be able to dream while she is awake

They say that some yogis can see auras, that psychics can see angels that follow us around trying to get a word in edgewise between the chatter of mental distraction, that medical intuitives can see into the body.

Most wise teachers agree that we (the untutored) don't SEE what is in front of us. Some also say that when the student is ready, the cat will appear.

Still I don't know what to do about Simone.

Maybe I should take her to a cat counselor, a feline psychotherapist, a kitty curandera.

Or I could get down to her level and try to see what is going on down there. I have tried to talk to her, but she just looks at me, with great patience and mild pity.

Someone with business sense would post her on YouTube and turn her into a cyber celebrity.

Or I could just ignore the her odd behaviors and carry on, apologizing to the sensible ones for my crazy cat.

Either way, she doesn't seem to care what I think. She seems happy responding to things I don't grasp. What to do about such a thing? What to do when a heart goes wild at the scent of possibility? How to react when the knees go weak and I want to kneel at the wonder of it all? What to say when the body can't find words that need to be said, the urgency pounding at the walls of a container due for opening?

Something has broken open in me and the answer of what to do, part of me knows, lies in listening to a crazy cat who see things I have not yet learned to see.


*Apologies to all who are tired of cat/dog/pet cuteness video saturation.

The Perils of the Heart (Fiction Excerpt )

Chapter One: The Hitch Hiker

Since you asked me what I was doing out here hitching a ride in the cold, I’ll tell you. Just turn up the heat, please. And thanks for the ride. Funny how I don’t feel so cold when there is no hope of warming up. Put me in a car though, or in somebody’s living room, and right away I feel cold. Outside I just get used to it, or numb. 

It’s a long drive to Albuquerque, and if you’re going that far, I’ll take the lift.

So yeah, I'm going a long way in this weather, and my reasons for being out here are ... complicated... I guess you could say. It's a long story. If you want to hear about it, I’d be glad to tell it, but you will need some time. It looks like the day is still young, and the drive will take a while. 

Now, I’m going to lay it out for you, not editing so much. You seem like a pretty smart guy, so I won’t spare you the edges. 

Back then, before all this started, I had gotten through school, I had a pretty good job, was married, stable. Not exactly happy, but getting along if you know what I mean. The bills got paid and I was responsible. I lived in a big city, not like this place. I mean here there is nothing but sky, lava flows, red sandstone, and wind. The winds just never stops blowing. But it’s where tumbleweeds like me end up.

You can be as sad as you want here, but everyone is so busy trying to survive they don’t encourage your staying that way. Thanks for the heat by the way. That feels good. I forget how cold I am.

You need to understand something: there is a wild way of being that runs counter to sensibility. Because it cannot be tamed, living like this leads to trouble. I guess that’s where I went wrong, as some people would see it, or right, as my heart tells me. But following something as tenuous and insubstantial as the heart has led to my standing here, by this road, alone, unforgiven by almost everyone who knows me. It is cold and I have nothing left, nothing, that is except memories and a certainty that I had no choice, that I would do it all again if I had it to do over.

It was a dream, of course, and its effect on me was no less that being struck by a truck or lightning, only you couldn't see it. It was like the solar flares that no one can see until they show up as shimmering curtains of light in the atmosphere. You can't see or touch them, but they are there, as real as rocks, nonetheless. This dream took hold of me in a stranglehold. Either I would follow it or I would die. Simple as that.

Pardon me. I just need to blow some warm air into my hands here. Whew. I get the shivers sometimes. OK, where was I?  Like most things, though, dreams can grow cold after a while if you don't care for them. When it was still alive, on fire, I felt good. 

And dreams often lead to people. One of these was a woman, and we met as a blue moon rose red over the rocks on a high plateau New Mexico. I had a flask of tequila, and she sang a song about tequila making a woman's clothes come off. She meant it to be funny, but all of a sudden I felt that stranglehold again. The body has its own language sometimes and it rises up to lay down the law, deliver that old ultimatum. All that mattered was that moment and the rushing rivers of chemicals and electricity. I felt like I would die from the thrill of it or perish from the denial of it. It wasn't going to go well either way, as far as things staying the same.No matter what happened, the thought of her was there, in the background. It would not leave me alone.

To Be Continued...

[From here, the story switches to the driver's (a straight-laced college teacher) perspective. He is taking the long way home and has no idea how this story, told by a hitch-hiking transient, will affect him.]

Hamlet, Fortinbras, and the Third Way

As the years go by, I notice that more and more of my peers, mainly middle-aged white guys, are retiring. I guess that’s what many white men (and women) get to do at this age. Some of us don’t get to do that and have to go on making a living to support kids in college, old cars that need repair, pay for health insurance, rent, and bags of bulk beans to cook over a modest campfire under the local bridge.

My peers, needless to say, sometimes puzzle me with their smug complacency. I (the somewhat bitter wage-slave "I") want to slap them; I want to DO something, anything. But I (the better "I") want to understand them too, to see how this self-absorbed soaking up of comfort is possible and figure out what to do about it.

So, these lucky ones, I have noticed, tend to share a kind of passive tolerance of the way things are. “Hey,” they say, “Things look fine to me. What’s your beef?”

One of them, who is quite educated, at an Ivy League School no less, and, not so surprisingly, is fond of quoting and pontificating on the merits of hedonism and passivity. He says things like, “There a have always been wars and alpha dogs and injustice and pestilence; they are the ways of this world. It’s best not to trouble yourself too much with them. Plus, who am I to tell anyone how to do things? I just don’t know for sure what is best.” They point to such great philosophers as H.L. Menken who wrote “Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’"

We can call this figure Hamlet.

Well, of course, I think. Who knows anything for sure? But is that an excuse to sit and do nothing if you have even the slightest inkling of what is happening to our fellow humans or our lovely planet? I will not enumerate the litany of crises facing humanity in the coming years. If one peeks, even briefly, at headlines, one sees a careening disaster in motion. And here, one can either despair and opt to be skewered on the horns of hedonism or nihilism. Or one can act, sometimes rashly, inspired by such thinkers as Edward Abbey who writes “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

A logical extreme of this worldview is Fortinbras, the "man of action," the "Decider," if we want to invoke a recent president.

In other words, one might be tempted to look at the question of reflection vs. action and answer it with an either/or argument: either “I don’t know what is best to do, so I will do nothing,” or “something must be done, so I’ll do the first thing to comes to mind, right or wrong.”

In spite of this particularly Western way of understanding things, one can imagine a third way, a both/and of reflection and action. Some people criticize meditation as “navel gazing,” but the Dalai Lama doesn’t see it that way. He says “the most important meditation is critical thinking – followed by action.”

To my mind, there are few icons of literature who embody or characterize this complex, paradoxical, dynamic process. 

Even without the telling detail of a name to go with the idea, I like avoiding the horns of a dilemma with a third way. It’s a both/and kind of thing, a dynamic system of thinking and action. 

Of course, now we have to figure out what he means by critical thinking, and, sadly, that is not something that is a priority to framers of educational policy – teachers, yes, but not policy makers.

Maybe, when I retire, Hamlet, Fortinbras, and I can chat and then do something good. I'd like that too. 

An Easter Invocation

This April is a month of anniversaries. A good friend, a loyal dog, and my mother all died in April. Last year I crashed hard coming down Mount Lemmon; I am still stiff and sore and feel the old man from that one. I have often wondered why T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but now agree, even if only by coincidence.

The leaves are opening here in the desert. Ground squirrels, desert spiny lizards, rattlesnakes, and bees are all more active as the days heat up. The semester has hit its crunch time before summer break.

You could call April the month of growth and remembrance, a month of paradox. I like that because I don't think I can have one without the other.  Dying and opening.

The hard aspects of my life -- having had to work menial jobs to get through college while my peers ran off to basketball games, feeling the pacifist misfit in a culture gone mad with violence -- have given me eyes to see those who are normally off the media radar. I know what it is like to sell newspapers standing on a median to indifferent and comfortable drivers in their air conditioned cars. I know what it's like to work all day and then have to write a paper on a hoity toity poem. I know what it is like to feel invisible, even if that invisibility has been white and male.

I know it and now need to remember it. Lately I have to confess, I want to give up, withdraw, fade away. I feel tired and discouraged.

Yet, when I step past that ennui, and fill the hummingbird feeder, clean out the fountain, listen to the voices in my students' papers, I find a flicker of will to go on.

When I look for it, I find the elusive, fragile, enduring memory of needing help, help only someone in my position could offer.

Standing Again On the Doorstep of Summer

Mesquite and palo verde trees are blooming, and the semester is winding down even as the days heat up. It will be in the 90s today, pushing a hundred later next week. Full blown spring with a taste of summer.

As the days go by, I wonder what I will do with this summer. I always hope that I will write something over the summer, maybe even publish something.

Instead, I have written vignettes that turned into blogs that a few people read, but don't really care about and would not pay for.

So, why do I do this? What's my story about writing? I am trying to figure out what I have to say, what I think, what the thread is running through the chaos of my life, for starters.

I am also trying to shape, or form, who it is that resides beneath the waters of my unexamined psyche. I write to blow off steam too. I write to rant. I should be nice to my bride, but I am not. She is not so happy with me and I am not so happy with all the things she wants to do with my time. I keep running away.

Summer makes it worse. It's hot and tiring. I do manual labor because we are not satisfied with what we have. We are building a house and planning to live in another place. One home, one place, is not enough. Always moving, always hungry.  

Will I finally wake up and begin to focus on the short time I have left on this earth? Or will I continue to act as if I will live forever and continue to put things off "until I have time?"

The "I'll get to it later" way of thinking has resulted in piles upon piles of stuff in my home and office. I am a hoarder of bike wheels, jackets, and bike shoes. I have too many socks. Too many loose ends.

That's the way it is. I need to look straight at it in the hot, clear light of summer. I hope the heat will burn off some of the fat in my thinking, my fat habits. We'll see how it goes. 

The Tipping Point

Seems like the whole world's walking pretty and you can't find no room to move. -- Bruce Springsteen, "Tenth Avenue Freezeout"

The changes are incremental at first: a lost word here, an unpaid bill there, a forgotten birthday card.  But they add up, and pretty soon, the world is moving too fast. It pulls away, slowly, but steadily. Pretty soon it has rounded the bend ahead and you are left plugging along on your own. 

Each word, forgotten appointment, missed commitment leaves a vacuum, an empty space, where once you know there was "something." The brain scrambles to place the missing puzzle piece back into place, searches in vain for the word. 

If you are not supposed to be right up there with the hustle and bustle, there is not much of a problem. You coast along and eventually pull off and take a long nap under the trees that line the road. 

That is the luxury afforded to the affluent, those ready and able to retire. 

But you are supposed to be right there with the group, on top of the latest initiative, plan, problem, report, appointment, decision. That's when things get dicey, when you feel shame.

You feel like you have to keep up if you want to have health insurance, pay the rent, keep the car running. Pulling off into the trees is not an option and you push yourself harder to keep up.

For a few years you can do it. You close the gap and the rest of the group believes that you are there with them, willing and able to sustain the pace, eat up the tasks of midlife -- house-holding, productive contribution. But those efforts become harder and you can't continue that level of output. The pace is just too fast for your heart, lungs, legs. You vision shrinks to a tunnel. You see the world through a tube that becomes longer and longer, limiting your field of vision.

What happens then? Those up ahead forget you and move on, consumed by their own problems and pushing hard enough to hang or maybe even pull ahead. 

You are left with a memory of what it was like. But even that fades as the will to go on withers like falling leaf.

At some point you are asked to surrender. Your income, insurance, car keys, friends, faculties, are all confiscated. If you are lucky, you get left alone. 

Then it begins not to matter so much, except when a cadre of cells detects the pheromones of hope or desire. 

Such is the insult that is called growing old. But an insult only works when one is still attached to the illusion of an identity that has to be defended. Aging has a way of ripping away strength and the hope that I might still win.

In Western culture, where personal worth derives from achievement and image, the decline of faculties can lead to despair. We see ourselves as our work, our wealth, our looks, our abilities. Even some "spiritual teachers" conflate the soul with wealth and social standing. (Those teachers, by the way, tend to charge exorbitant rates for their wisdom; they tend to live luxuriously and work only with the well-to-do.) The arts, though, if they are good, see past the ethos of the bottom line, the Performance Principle. Eastern thought even gives us multiple chances to get it right. You're working for a different master. 

Recently, I was overtaken by a surprising surge of energy that one could only call love, a fierce, unrequited love, and I had no defense against it. Some fine writers have reported back to us readers that such experiences signal their descent into the swirling waters of surrender, annihilation of the self, a live wire of intensified poignancy. Rumi writes "there are no edges to my loving now." and Gabriel Garcia Marquez says, "The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love." Ruben Dario writes "When I want to cry, I can't/but I cry without wanting to."

The controlled self, whatever that is, falls away, and joins something bigger, more universal. It seems that what looks like decline in aging may be an opportunity for entry. Falling behind is not necessarily the end, but rather passage through a portal. A lifetime of keeping up may be prologue. One's heart, or soul, or better self, a spiritual presence, or whatever you want to call it can begin to guide you.

As the racers fade around the bend, what seemed disaster may become blessing. The light burns most intensely when it consumes the ephemeral.