Sciatica

I am currently incapacitated and hobbled by pain. That pain erases my hopes and plans for the day, and instead, the proximity and reminder of the ephemeral vulnerablity of this body sit down next to me again. Mortality sits close and takes up the entire frame of my awareness. 

I feel the scarcity of time left to me and load the awareness into every step I take. The onslaught of fact and memory whispers at the edges of my struggles to attach ice packs and heating pads. I meet my desires that are braided into the failures of talent and circumstance and hold my hands up to the hot fires of grief. I approach but don't immerse myself in the emotions. 

I track the timeline of my life in a random collage of images. The memories rise out the mysteries of shadow. I wander the streets of Merida, Yucatan, wake up under a bridge on a hitch-hiking journey through Texas, see the beloved ghosts of women I have loved, now dead. I too am approaching the end, but it not a big deal. In fact it is routine, a passing of another unrealized human. 

Here, in the dark, on the edges of pain, I try to reconcile with the unrequited business of my life. It's a secret and solitary business, one that no one will read or know.

I didn't think it would go this way. My spring was supposed to be pain-free, a trip to New Mexico, where I would fill the fountain, feed the birds, explore the forests on my bicycle, nail down some licks on the guitar, and maybe paint some of my dreams. 

Instead I sit here crippled with a cocktail of meds -- Meloxicam, steroids, Gabafentin, Banofen, Tramadol -- that are not up to holding the line on pain. I am forced to sit and ruminate on the random wanderings of my mind. Memories assail me. I am thrown into the gauntlet on my end-of-life urgency to come to terms with the path my life has taken.

The unborn curriculum glows with a heat I cannot survive, but I warm myself in the proximity I can handle. It won't let me rest.

The pain rises and falls. I walk when I can, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the porch. I sit when I cannot walk. No position is comfortable. For short periods, when the meds meet the pain, I sleep. My dreams are a fever of mystery and shadow -- climbing mountains, driving through rivers, chasing ships on the ocean, lusting after the relief, the melting that is sexual union. 

It is not what I thought my days would be. It is what it is, and I am learning to lean into the pain. 

I wait for relief. I surrender into the pain, and this moment is the sum of my reality. I watch the screen of mu mind but live the hot and glowing wire of pain. All that matters is that I curl into a chasm of what comfort I can find. There is no escape.  

Awakening Stardust

 

I have no choice but to compose this chapter called Aging. The plot, tone, scene, and arc are up to me, but the outcome is obligatory, the conclusion foregone. I am leaning into introversion, exploring the canyons of psyche, the geology of conditioning, the bones, ligaments, and anatomy of narrative and history of conditioning. I travel through the topography as a witness, the terrain a snapshot of territory in flux, as temporary as a flower, about to be washed away by rushing force of time and mortality.

If I build anything here, it is the practice of seeing, listening, and surrendering all that I have held up as "me." The space I inhabit is not a space at all, but a wave on its way to somewhere else, a wave out of a particle. "I" am disintegrating as I loosen my grip on what I thought was solid and permanent, but "I" am also connecting to something larger, something ongoing, something moving, a force traveling as light between the space of matter, but infusing matter. 

I begin to understand what the phrase "made of stardust" really means. The egoic Erec is a transient manifestation of form; the soul abiding and animating the flesh goes on into iterations and evolving transformations. I never left cosmic origins, but I may have forgotten them.

The upshot of this is that I have no choice but to choose love, to love this life, even as the form of it fades, declines, and eventually disolves. Release is the hardest part of love, as the hands only know grasping. I have to learn another way. 

My transition may come sooner than I think since I am losing contact with this material plane, but while I am here I need to live unfettered life of surrender and heartbreak, as in the heart breaking open.  

Turning 68

 

It's calm now, moon past full, still high among the lingering storm clouds.

I walk a narrow path in the wolf hour as song dogs sing.

It's time to go deep, down into the hole in my heart to meet the demons and angels dwelling there, to connect with the flow of energy surging through me and all things.

The years of trying to please and get it right have ended.  I let those stories go and travel light, my senses tuned to the urge calling me forward, up and out of my habits, my confining skin.

The work now is about descending, settling, parting the veil between this world and the mystery of spirit.

It's not the sun I long for, but the velvet skies of midnight

Stars are my company, my guides.

I am coming, my lost and exiled soul.

I gather up my staff, shed all that is unnecessary, and travel north to find you, trusting that my feet will find this strange, invisible path.

Faith is braided into the weary bones, tired eyes, and slow steps.

My heart knows the way.

I'll see you when the new day dawns. 

Fraying At the Edges

When an organ like the brain starts to go, it's not so dramatic or accessible to others as a cancer or a heart condition. It's more subtle, nuanced, more subjective. You feel like you are walking precariously near a precipice in the dark and are about to slip and plunge into a void of blank static, but no one knows. No one else can see the edge that you sense. Novelty becomes something to dread because it shoves you right up to that edge of not knowing, of just emptiness, confusion, and anxiety about not knowing what to do, how to proceed, especially when everyone else seems to be clear and confident and excited. Watching others soar at the prospect of learning makes you frustrated and angry. All you want to do is be left alone to contemplate your demise, to surrender to oblivion's cool embrace.

Crazy Old Man

My big green kayak has slipped from its perch. It lies there on its side, looking every bit the forlorn, neglected dream that it is. I was going to travel to Baja and paddle off into the sunset, never to return. That was a few years ago, and plans have changed. 

I have to get realistic about where I am in life, and where I am is old, weak, and ugly. Just a fact. No judgment, remorse, or self pity.

So the kayak is going to stay here, most likely, for the rest of its natural life, the rest of my natural life. 

If that is the case, what is it that I am going to do with the days I have left? The answer to that is more about inside work than outside, visible, material doing. 

I want to become the crazy old man who lives the life impractical. I want to lean into getting old, feeble, senile, and free of inhibitions, to live the life that I feel will be my best life:  more art, more music, more honesty, more generosity, more emotion. I'll probably cry a lot more. 

So, there you have it -- my plan in a nutshell. 

Time to go prop that kayak up, give it some dignity in its old age.

Moonlight Moment

She is my wife of forty years, breathing softly, lying behind me, spooned close, on a night draped in moonlight. My arm reaches for her, drawn to her heat, and inserts itself into narrow space between us. My hand and fingers rest there at the portal to her, touching so tenderly that there is more electricity than contact. She is as new as birth to me, and I wait for movement, a shift of weight that opens her, a squeeze that says "I know you are there. Yes." before I advance. Moments pass like hours. I wait. The moon rises higher, shining on us. I walk a razor's edge of attention, all focused at that tiny point of contact, my blood pounding in my temples so loud I wonder if she can hear it. She is flesh made of light, and I feel I could pass a hand right through her as the faintest of squeezes, a slight pump of tissue offers an invitation to share her secret. I am slow, gentle, moving at glacier speed, but on fire. My touch sees the architecture of her, sacred folds and mounds and silken planes. She is weightless and made of sparkling photons. I touch the mystery driving fusion, super novae, life force. She rises and crests and writhes again and again as waves of energy pass through us both. She is more soul than flesh, and something like eternity wraps us in its blanket. She is not one for irony and says that she now understands the Big Bang and how it is baked into the design of desire and living things. Silence informs my touch moving over her as moonlight rains down in a moment of grace, of earthy pleasure, a delight that passes into memory as the moon winks and nods and slides toward the horizon. Too soon only a memory, 

Hopelessly Analog

 

The truck is humming along at two thousand RPM, and the wind comes in gusts against the windshield as I head north out of Tucson for the summer. I don't have ear buds, Bluetooth, or Spotify. In fact, I don't even have a radio that works. The CD player died years ago. I sit and listen to the sound of the motor, the tires on the pavement, the creaks and rattles of the twenty-two year old truck. I smell the faint trace of gas after the last fill-up. I swivel into the seat to find a comfortable position and start watching the wildflowers along the highway. In another hour or two, I may even sing to myself or jot down a phrase in my notebook. The stimuli are abundant in this here-and-now of moving away from the city and into the wide vistas of the desert highlands. 

You may think this is a primitive way to take a road trip. I mean -- no music, no audio book, no Surround Sound. But, the truth for me is that I like it. I prefer the emptiness to the digital, streaming distraction from this moment that otherwise fills my awareness. I like to hear what the quiet has to tell me, what the tedium of the long hours offers up as a nugget of truth as my mind spins out along with the wheels and the machinery at work all around me. I find I make something out of space rather than merely consume what the producers want me to see and hear.

I find it soothing, like sinking my feet down through mud to the bottom of a stream bed. I find joy here in these moments emptied of digital stimulation. I rarely get to hear what I think beneath all the noise of input, the battle for eyeballs, and competition for attention. I like to give my all to right here, right now, sore butt included.