inspired impulses divinely implanted
now activated to release the trembling
of a momentarily retained terror
a leaping off-branch of near-farcical fury
terrific wing-thrust arriving
against the curious weight
of unseen air
each and every beating blackbird heart
newly unbound
in the coordinated dimension
of a sudden spiraling jaunt
all that is needed to regroup
again free to be
wholly together
fright unfrozen
in a moment's newfound flight
Monday, November 23, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
FLIGHT
had an afternoon cup of coffee yesterday
a latte at yusif's cafe on yale
who by the way is having regular live music
tuesday through friday evenings
been living so clean lately
it kicked in some nice endorphins
suddenly my thinking was reconnected to my body
all the more evident after two days otherwise
as an interesting thought brought pleasure
rather than paradoxical emptiness
and i realized there is a profound connection
between psychological unease
addictive behavior
trauma
and endorphin-flow
________________
walking home i laughed out loud
with the first moment of delight in two days
as i stopped at the largest evergreen tree on the block
to observe about 500 blackbirds gathered there
upon which they took to flight above me
in a massive explosion of fluttering wings
to hurriedly circle over silver avenue
and return to the evergreen
and saw as i walked on
their being joined
by a hundred more
a latte at yusif's cafe on yale
who by the way is having regular live music
tuesday through friday evenings
been living so clean lately
it kicked in some nice endorphins
suddenly my thinking was reconnected to my body
all the more evident after two days otherwise
as an interesting thought brought pleasure
rather than paradoxical emptiness
and i realized there is a profound connection
between psychological unease
addictive behavior
trauma
and endorphin-flow
________________
walking home i laughed out loud
with the first moment of delight in two days
as i stopped at the largest evergreen tree on the block
to observe about 500 blackbirds gathered there
upon which they took to flight above me
in a massive explosion of fluttering wings
to hurriedly circle over silver avenue
and return to the evergreen
and saw as i walked on
their being joined
by a hundred more
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
pain
I smashed my finger today at work, the same finger i smashed a month ago, in the same way. The pain was so intense i involuntarily screamed. It was the most severe moment of pain i've experienced since kidney stones a couple years ago, although it was only momentary, rather than hours-long. Surprisingly, only a couple hours later, it just felt sore--like after the first smash, so i figured it was likely not broken.
The trauma was even more intense psychologically. As with the first smash, the first thing that occured to my mind after screaming was something like a feeling of complete rage at, and betrayal by, the Universe. Like the first event, i then wondered if i would ever play music again. This was followed by the realization i would not play viola, as planned, at this weekend's marimba performance.
Still in a state of desperation, and still fully alone in my experience (although later people would report they heard my yell from outside the cooler), i wondered what to do. Kicking over a trash can felt slightly useful. I sat down in the break room, bowed my head and silently said an Our Father. I noticed while doing so, i was completely dissociated from the burning rage in my chest that had been so persistent in the previous moments. This shift was more disconcerting than comforting.
I thought the tresspass part of the prayer might echo in my consciousness somehow, but it was lead us not into temptation i kept stumbling over. This i took as a guide for the managing the ensuing moments, which seemed useful, and likely had a slight calming effect. A fellow crewmember came in, saw me sitting and not responding, offering as he walked out that he just made some decent coffee if i'd like some. I appreciated the gentle kindness of his voice. I did have a small cup, which helped me ground. By then the pain had become tolerable enough to report it rather calmly and professionally to the foreman.
For about the next hour i was in a really miserable state mentally, coping externally--moving yogurt boxes around, but not all there. It was reminiscent of psychotic states i experienced in 1992. (In retrospect, it is interesting that all trauma at this point in my life is a re-experiencing of prior trauma, perhaps coming up to be unwound? To be able to retrace the various qualitites and patterns along the pathway between normal thinking and schizophrenic offers a certain integrative opportunity i suppose. I did not have this sense of meaning this morning.)
At the time, my adrenaline was so flooded that my mind was just hammering at trying to find meaning amidst this event. Thoughts ran relentlessly: Did i create it by thinking wrong thoughts? Did my dyslexia blog set me up? (I did notice an oddly distinct moment of dyslexia while printing out an invoice a couple minutes before hurting myself.) Am I being punished for something? Ancestral karma? Is it a test of my faith?
When i neglected to ask for help consolidating the pallet of turkeys, was i giving in to poor-quality "have-to" thinking? Am i paying the price for wrong thinking about that whole subject.
Maybe the new agers are right, and our thoughts and words create our reality. (This led to deeper suffering as i began to imagine i needed to constrict my thoughts and words to only the good ones, and for the rest of my life.) This fed into kototama principle-related thoughts: i must be vibrating on a wrong dimensional frequency. Maybe i need to quit and teach kototama...
Along with this, I felt just so stupid for doing the same thing to the same finger. I thought i liked it here now, i was feeling strong and safe. How can i trust anything i think or feel now? (More suffering.) Why the same frikin finger? What is the meaning of pain? Why does God provide such pain, and why is it apparently doled out so unjustly? Or is it about some evil influence?
As i began stocking individual yogurts onto shelves, i found some consolation remembering a book from anthropology class, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us. It was a description of the conditions and experiences of Bolivian miners, most of whom are indigenous, very poor and without many options. I recalled how many of them lose their health and lives to the mines. Yet the mine is such an intergal part of their experience that the workers find their strengths, their personalities, their emotions, even their cosmology in relation to it (or "her"). Most of the workers feel a deep personal affection for her--as provider, as supernatural being, as Earth--along with their fears.
I began to feel less crazy, thinking i may have been forming a similar relationship with the dairy box, and TJ's in general. The place has given me a sense of strength and competence, achievement, camraderie, exercise, daily rhythm. I've also had as many large and small injuries on this job as i can remember anywhere else i've worked. I eat the box and the box eats me. As is often the case, i am able to find context and sympathetic understanding for my experience from beyond my own cultural framework of what it means to be human.
Then i thought of how many others get injured in labor jobs, some of whom give up, some of whom persevere despite way worse situations. I recalled an immigrant's story of his father's heroic commitment to his job, despite such a situation. And thinking this, i felt still less alone, and hence less stupid, and less crazy. Empathy from closer to home. (And useful info about my psychology also: aloneness infused my psychosis deeply also.)
As the morning wore on, i shared my pain with a couple folks, and received some very sincere real-time empathic responses, which were deeply appreciated. By mid-morning, it all seemed like less of a big deal. Maybe i'm just f*cking clumsy.
Finding that meaning-in-the-pain had become a less psychotically-pressing matter.
The trauma was even more intense psychologically. As with the first smash, the first thing that occured to my mind after screaming was something like a feeling of complete rage at, and betrayal by, the Universe. Like the first event, i then wondered if i would ever play music again. This was followed by the realization i would not play viola, as planned, at this weekend's marimba performance.
Still in a state of desperation, and still fully alone in my experience (although later people would report they heard my yell from outside the cooler), i wondered what to do. Kicking over a trash can felt slightly useful. I sat down in the break room, bowed my head and silently said an Our Father. I noticed while doing so, i was completely dissociated from the burning rage in my chest that had been so persistent in the previous moments. This shift was more disconcerting than comforting.
I thought the tresspass part of the prayer might echo in my consciousness somehow, but it was lead us not into temptation i kept stumbling over. This i took as a guide for the managing the ensuing moments, which seemed useful, and likely had a slight calming effect. A fellow crewmember came in, saw me sitting and not responding, offering as he walked out that he just made some decent coffee if i'd like some. I appreciated the gentle kindness of his voice. I did have a small cup, which helped me ground. By then the pain had become tolerable enough to report it rather calmly and professionally to the foreman.
For about the next hour i was in a really miserable state mentally, coping externally--moving yogurt boxes around, but not all there. It was reminiscent of psychotic states i experienced in 1992. (In retrospect, it is interesting that all trauma at this point in my life is a re-experiencing of prior trauma, perhaps coming up to be unwound? To be able to retrace the various qualitites and patterns along the pathway between normal thinking and schizophrenic offers a certain integrative opportunity i suppose. I did not have this sense of meaning this morning.)
At the time, my adrenaline was so flooded that my mind was just hammering at trying to find meaning amidst this event. Thoughts ran relentlessly: Did i create it by thinking wrong thoughts? Did my dyslexia blog set me up? (I did notice an oddly distinct moment of dyslexia while printing out an invoice a couple minutes before hurting myself.) Am I being punished for something? Ancestral karma? Is it a test of my faith?
When i neglected to ask for help consolidating the pallet of turkeys, was i giving in to poor-quality "have-to" thinking? Am i paying the price for wrong thinking about that whole subject.
Maybe the new agers are right, and our thoughts and words create our reality. (This led to deeper suffering as i began to imagine i needed to constrict my thoughts and words to only the good ones, and for the rest of my life.) This fed into kototama principle-related thoughts: i must be vibrating on a wrong dimensional frequency. Maybe i need to quit and teach kototama...
Along with this, I felt just so stupid for doing the same thing to the same finger. I thought i liked it here now, i was feeling strong and safe. How can i trust anything i think or feel now? (More suffering.) Why the same frikin finger? What is the meaning of pain? Why does God provide such pain, and why is it apparently doled out so unjustly? Or is it about some evil influence?
As i began stocking individual yogurts onto shelves, i found some consolation remembering a book from anthropology class, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us. It was a description of the conditions and experiences of Bolivian miners, most of whom are indigenous, very poor and without many options. I recalled how many of them lose their health and lives to the mines. Yet the mine is such an intergal part of their experience that the workers find their strengths, their personalities, their emotions, even their cosmology in relation to it (or "her"). Most of the workers feel a deep personal affection for her--as provider, as supernatural being, as Earth--along with their fears.
I began to feel less crazy, thinking i may have been forming a similar relationship with the dairy box, and TJ's in general. The place has given me a sense of strength and competence, achievement, camraderie, exercise, daily rhythm. I've also had as many large and small injuries on this job as i can remember anywhere else i've worked. I eat the box and the box eats me. As is often the case, i am able to find context and sympathetic understanding for my experience from beyond my own cultural framework of what it means to be human.
Then i thought of how many others get injured in labor jobs, some of whom give up, some of whom persevere despite way worse situations. I recalled an immigrant's story of his father's heroic commitment to his job, despite such a situation. And thinking this, i felt still less alone, and hence less stupid, and less crazy. Empathy from closer to home. (And useful info about my psychology also: aloneness infused my psychosis deeply also.)
As the morning wore on, i shared my pain with a couple folks, and received some very sincere real-time empathic responses, which were deeply appreciated. By mid-morning, it all seemed like less of a big deal. Maybe i'm just f*cking clumsy.
Finding that meaning-in-the-pain had become a less psychotically-pressing matter.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
4 a.m. journal
The morning after the fledgling men's group meeting i was fortunate enough to wake half an hour before my four a.m. alarm, in order to journal before work four more pages of evolving clarity, which began:
Men's groups are for me like an addiction, triggering a desire for more: more masculinity, passion, pushing, power, dominance, purpose, camraderie. I have found in life it's better to leave most needs unmet, in order to leave the excesses of the personality behind.
Italians don't do well in these settings: such groups ask for an "authentic" expression of personal self, which for us does not exist outside of the real. This is due to our inherent wretchedness, which only other italians understand, but which gets projected out as its opposite--love--precisely amidst the pressure of the real, the demands of life.
This is exactly why the new age assertion that "there are no have-to's in life" does not work! Have-to's are the saving grace of life for this man, having forged all that is useful and truly enjoyable in my world of milk crates and money, homeless initiatives, poetry and prayer. Without such have-to's, particularly those in which the inner and outer worlds meet, life has no rudder. On this soul level, there are no men and women.
Now, making sense of conpiracies and peace-work are on my plate, the soul's current have-to's. Such awkward forays, in their honesty, at least stoke hard-won initiatives for holistic well-being, divinity meditation and the seeking of personal power precisely for non-egoic purposes, such as finding true peace and justice work based on a more accurate assessment of the true political landscape.
I am enjoying a sense of acceptance in finding the right relationship to the world of conspiracy, neither obsessing nor ignoring it, but utilizing it to find appropriate responses to the world's violence. Realizing the cultural roots of my alienation to conventional viewpoints has been key. Most americans think "oh there can be no such thing as a ruling elitist overclass pulling so many strings behind the scenes," and thus take news reports as reflecting some objective reality. A few americans who have taken up the conspiracy viewpoint react from what seems to me an equally violent "buy gold and grab your guns" approach.
Southern italians--having been at the mercy of a thousand years of papal authoritarian nonsense, crusades and inquisitions, mafia social control, invasions, financial manipulations, and the like--have a slightly different take! So do post-nazism germans...and for that matter post-communist propaganda-world russians, war-weary latin americans, and most of the people of the planet--none of whom are represented in the news. I am imagining that amidst the recognition of the a priori acknowledgment of both self and others' right to exist, there is a more realistic appraisal available of one's choices, power and obligations...
Men's groups are for me like an addiction, triggering a desire for more: more masculinity, passion, pushing, power, dominance, purpose, camraderie. I have found in life it's better to leave most needs unmet, in order to leave the excesses of the personality behind.
Italians don't do well in these settings: such groups ask for an "authentic" expression of personal self, which for us does not exist outside of the real. This is due to our inherent wretchedness, which only other italians understand, but which gets projected out as its opposite--love--precisely amidst the pressure of the real, the demands of life.
This is exactly why the new age assertion that "there are no have-to's in life" does not work! Have-to's are the saving grace of life for this man, having forged all that is useful and truly enjoyable in my world of milk crates and money, homeless initiatives, poetry and prayer. Without such have-to's, particularly those in which the inner and outer worlds meet, life has no rudder. On this soul level, there are no men and women.
Now, making sense of conpiracies and peace-work are on my plate, the soul's current have-to's. Such awkward forays, in their honesty, at least stoke hard-won initiatives for holistic well-being, divinity meditation and the seeking of personal power precisely for non-egoic purposes, such as finding true peace and justice work based on a more accurate assessment of the true political landscape.
I am enjoying a sense of acceptance in finding the right relationship to the world of conspiracy, neither obsessing nor ignoring it, but utilizing it to find appropriate responses to the world's violence. Realizing the cultural roots of my alienation to conventional viewpoints has been key. Most americans think "oh there can be no such thing as a ruling elitist overclass pulling so many strings behind the scenes," and thus take news reports as reflecting some objective reality. A few americans who have taken up the conspiracy viewpoint react from what seems to me an equally violent "buy gold and grab your guns" approach.
Southern italians--having been at the mercy of a thousand years of papal authoritarian nonsense, crusades and inquisitions, mafia social control, invasions, financial manipulations, and the like--have a slightly different take! So do post-nazism germans...and for that matter post-communist propaganda-world russians, war-weary latin americans, and most of the people of the planet--none of whom are represented in the news. I am imagining that amidst the recognition of the a priori acknowledgment of both self and others' right to exist, there is a more realistic appraisal available of one's choices, power and obligations...
Friday, November 13, 2009
autumny day reflections
having loosed myself from laptop ownership
and its concomitant basement-chaining existence
i find myself at the local internet cafe on this autumny day
my thoughts and writings infused instead
by red and yellow leaves hanging on branches
whose grey-brown growth patterns are soon to be fully revealed
by winter's denuding
grey skies' quiet provide a psychic nest
where thoughts of grand conspiracy
so natural to italian existentialists
blend seamlessly with the leaf-blower and fence-constructor
working through their mornings in my neighborhood
after five consecutive days
unloading and stacking milk crates in the morning
and community building in the evening
i have granted myself a day of rest
i celebrate joining the board of directors
for nonviolent communication in new mexico
muse on the next practice group at the peace & justice center
and the initiative to teach at healthcare for the homeless
which i have also agreed to
as well as a new inspiration in restoratve justice circles
and the hope this model provides
for actually listening to others' needs in the community
and offering a space to empower actions for meeting them
i don't know if any of this is ever enough
but it offers solace that i am doing something
other than paying taxes to fund an endless war against made-up enemies
and in measure offers some balance to the current life's portrait:
community supporter
milk crate stacker
savory leaf walker
and its concomitant basement-chaining existence
i find myself at the local internet cafe on this autumny day
my thoughts and writings infused instead
by red and yellow leaves hanging on branches
whose grey-brown growth patterns are soon to be fully revealed
by winter's denuding
grey skies' quiet provide a psychic nest
where thoughts of grand conspiracy
so natural to italian existentialists
blend seamlessly with the leaf-blower and fence-constructor
working through their mornings in my neighborhood
after five consecutive days
unloading and stacking milk crates in the morning
and community building in the evening
i have granted myself a day of rest
i celebrate joining the board of directors
for nonviolent communication in new mexico
muse on the next practice group at the peace & justice center
and the initiative to teach at healthcare for the homeless
which i have also agreed to
as well as a new inspiration in restoratve justice circles
and the hope this model provides
for actually listening to others' needs in the community
and offering a space to empower actions for meeting them
i don't know if any of this is ever enough
but it offers solace that i am doing something
other than paying taxes to fund an endless war against made-up enemies
and in measure offers some balance to the current life's portrait:
community supporter
milk crate stacker
savory leaf walker
Friday, November 6, 2009
november
autumn beauty being reported by several friends at this time, life coming into balance, as we get to take a few breaths and get on top of things, whether it be our woodpiles or our dream-lives
i wonder if sudden early freezing snow kind of gets our attention, prompting us to organize for coming winter, after which all of this summery warmth and autumnal color seems just such a luxurious bonus
still have not spoken with korea, while it is nice to have options, i am feeling a relaxed sustainability here, as i settle into middle age, with work moving into a more satisfying flow providing exercise and money for saving, and the economy holding out another day, i feel in no rush to tromp across the ocean to teach english
last little sf marimba group performance of the year on the 20th, then it's time off from the weekly commutes, as the weather and dark arrive, leaving more space for holidays, beard growth and napping
Sunday, November 1, 2009
plans
it comes down to killing time
as my vigor fully recovers
and i save enough money
to again venture forth
a love interest
could alter timing
and meanwhile is welcome
i know waiting patiently for things to develop
health money love
generally turns out to be the best strategy
but it generally never feels so
during the waiting
_____________
work's become sustainable
and a grand's in the bank
yet with another contact made
asia looks more likely
there i can save money
while having adventure
beyond the psychic borders of dying empire
the bonus being paid in a currency
that is not weekly losing 5% of its value
en route to complete collapse
____________________
someday i will be wealthy
enough to fund some spiritual activism
once it becomes clear to me
whether joining a christian peacemaker team
does the world more good
than simply retiring
to a zen monastery
as my vigor fully recovers
and i save enough money
to again venture forth
a love interest
could alter timing
and meanwhile is welcome
i know waiting patiently for things to develop
health money love
generally turns out to be the best strategy
but it generally never feels so
during the waiting
_____________
work's become sustainable
and a grand's in the bank
yet with another contact made
asia looks more likely
there i can save money
while having adventure
beyond the psychic borders of dying empire
the bonus being paid in a currency
that is not weekly losing 5% of its value
en route to complete collapse
____________________
someday i will be wealthy
enough to fund some spiritual activism
once it becomes clear to me
whether joining a christian peacemaker team
does the world more good
than simply retiring
to a zen monastery
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