With money running out, and too many spins turning my mind to mush, I have done the unthinkable and asked my old boss in burque if he would consider rehiring me. It was an odd call from Love's truckstop in central California, but he thought they might have a place. So I have a meeting planned with him for Monday.
Much could go wrong with this plan yet. The front tires on the van are sketchy and worry me, and I do not have the money to replace them. At the moment I think I have the gas money to get to the interview, but need to check the math.
Ironies abound: I spent over a thousand bucks on the brother-in-law's Sebring which I continue to effort to sell for peanuts. That car also needs to be squared away one way or another by Saturday night. I don't think I have the fifty bucks to fed-ex the car title to Germany to get the sale done. So that's a mess.
It's possible I rent a parking spot for the van with all my stuff, and drive the Sebring back for the interview and vacation, fly back out in a month on a weekend to get the van with all my stuff. Or maybe sell the van tomorrow instead and throw everything I own in a dumpster. Or walk away from both vehicles and the interview and just sleep on the beach in the rain. Or just turn myself into a mental hospital now before the full blown psychosis hits.
I have tried smoking my way forward. It has been an amazing medicine for generating awareness of alternate strategies along the way the last couple months. I've also stopped a few times, when I have felt myself becoming confused--and this is one of those times. The alternate routes and the straight routes now completely diverge and neither makes any sense. And now smoking just leaves me with a big fat useless head I don't quite have a name for, but it's something in the realm of mania.
Today there is a picnic planned with a woman I adore, but at the moment it is raining. She is a former coworker, young, complex and living with someone, but there is something deeply honest and mutual between us. Neither of us know what it is exactly, but it feels a lot to me like full-blown and inconvenient love. In some alternate reality, she has followed through with her longing to travel with me to New Mexico, and anywhere we want to go.
On this plane, I am reminded of those few women I have had the big heart for, often in such circumstances. There is a magnetism generated from flying along on autonomously-powered chakras on the edge between adventure and disaster. And always to be true to the very passion that has helped kindle the connection, it seems I must also leave. That program needs to change, and it will--as I learn the capacity for commitment without disaster.
I am tired of leaving places. Leaving northern California family and beautiful mud the other day was hard. Leaving here--the ocean, community, huge learning, beautiful women I've been conversing with--is hard. My failing has been my inability to stop moving. If I could only accept that I deserve a space in society, despite not having a legitimate place to park, I could carry on with this path of watching the world crumble. But in regards to this holy path of non-participation with the evil of money, it turns out I have a couple of serious shortcomings: I do fear authority, and hate being broke. Most of all, I hate idleness.
The ocean does not need to force itself into activity when it is calm, and the birds do not permits to park--it is true, and this is the root of nearly all the problems in the world. The profit maximization which will neither allow the homeless to sleep outdoors, nor the Earth's oceans, forests and topsoil to regenerate.
Yet neither must the ocean force itself into idleness out of an ideal, when it in turn rages and surges with vital power. Hallelujah. And neither must the birds remain on the ground, scratching away at the same patch of sand: they insist on flying.
When I tried social work a couple years ago, I learned I am more anarchist than socialist. But here, I have learned how socialist I am, how European. I long for belonging, for order, and to be of service actively with the tasks of this life. I love work, when I can dictate the conditions of my labor amidst a mutual conversation: the exercise, the contribution, the appreciation, the free endorphins, the community, the challenges which wake up my proactive practices.
All these runaways doing little but smoking pot, waiting to be fed, and struggling to sleep: I relate to their ideals, their walking away from the societal violence, their return to the Earth. But as righteous as it all may be, I hate personal idleness as much as the genocidal violence and ecological catastrophe consuming the world.
I will thus find a way to fire up all of these chakras, remember I am more than this or that, and carry on. If you have ever watched a raven play, she is compelled to try new dives and spins to test her relation with the air currents, to see how it feels to fall in a new way. It is her freedom. For a moment she flutters in chaos, scrambling in absolute exertion so as not to crash on the rocks below.
Momentarily bedazzled, yet in the same dazzling instant, she is lifted up again, renewed and laughing, wiser for the experience. Shouting in delight: who is this wind that so moves me?
No comments:
Post a Comment