Already Spring

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 

irremediably.

Taking and Sending

The woman is old, nearly as old as I;
Her tongue working and making of her pleasant face
A monkey’s, moaning for the roll of deities to cease,
For the floor to hold still, for Death to open his hands:
I breathe in the fear and the confusion, I breathe out

Light and warmth, pouring from Those behind me
Whom I may not turn and see: breathe in the fear,
Breathe out the light. Give it all away. Every scrap
Of comfort. It was never mine to hold. It is not my peace.

There are others. A Protector, of sorts: dull gray.
Strangely impassible in this world of easy translucencies,
Porosities, She is up and to my right. I am forbidden
To Take and Send with her. All right. But in the corner,

That still heap of blankets (she put on her mask and pulled
The covers over at the outset, like a child, going to sleep):
A brightness has been growing there, a hidden light,
An unguessed generosity. Unto us a child is born

Again, and again. (Do you not understand?
You do not understand. Again, then. How many children
Must be born? All of them.) I contract to a tiny blue
Light, about to close its eye, to let its last ley lines fade:
The monkey’s face is mine, for a moment, and is gone.

The Dreams of Rabbits, Sleeping in my Hands

Oh Sir, I said, I have grown old dwelling in this hanker
And my hands are so empty and dry that the rabbits
Mistake them for husks, and try to build their nests in them.
Did you not say you would anoint us with the lymph of gods,
And wash us with fragrant oils, and wake us when the morning came?
He said, and how do you know that the rabbits are wrong? What did you think
They would look like, in this false and garish sun? The rabbits run
When they can, and so must you. Did you think I made a world
Without wolves? But Sir, I said, under this lamp we grow old so fast
Our nails crust with strange growths, we dig and strike sheets
Of rotten plastic in the earth. Can we ever plant or harvest here?
He laughed at me and said, so you thought I was kidding about death?
Now the seedbed of stars itself is crossed with crawling sabandijas
And night is a neon advertisement: what have you ever planted
But your own ruin? If you want to sleep, then wear yourself out with work;
If you want to work, then sleep till morning comes. What else can I say?
I have one vessel more, and I will break it open when the time comes.
But you have made their bed: now let them lie in it: dreams will come,
And you must read them as you can.

Psilocybin

Well. I certainly didn’t expect this physical exhaustion, this hangover, from psilocybin. I have been through the ringer. A mild headache; neck and shoulders all bunched up.

It was valuable. It was very much not what I expected, which is good, but it was very difficult in some ways.

One of the participants was having an intense and intermittently difficult experience, and was vocalizing a fair amount. Early on I started practicing tonglen (“taking and sending”) and I basically spent four hours doing really intense tonglen, mostly with her but with the other participant and the facilitator, too. It’s different when the taking and sending feels so palpable and literal. 

I wasn’t really tripping, in the sense of seeing pretty colors or apparitions of entities – I could see how one could go that way, I could have kept on my eye mask and turned inwards, but I felt called pretty urgently to attend to the others. So it was all about care-taking, for me. Often I felt, when “sending,” that there was something, or many somethings, behind me. Large and luminous persons. The light I was sending wasn’t emanating from me, it was coming through me. At one point I had the thought – it seemed profound at the time but now it seems faintly ridiculous – “well of course you can’t see God. You’d have to be facing the wrong way to do that.”

It was exhausting to refrain from touching people. Touch is my first language, the only real-time one I have ever been fluent in. But I supposedly didn’t know these people. So I sat in one place. Occasionally I felt an enormous constriction settling into me, and I had to breath deeply, find my hara, stay there a bit, let the thing lift. That too felt like a person, or persons: not necessarily malevolent, not necessarily intent on me at all. But I was surrounded by powers and intentions that I could just not quite hear or make intelligible. I found myself cocking my head, often, listening as hard as I could.

I am suspicious of conceptual take-aways from such experiences: they’re the probably the least useful way of responding. But one forms them no matter what, so here they are:

1. There’s a lot more going on than what I ordinarily let myself perceive. There are a lot of persons, a lot of intentions. In my ordinary state of mind I’m filtering out most of them. They are neither entirely inside me nor entirely outside me. (Are they real? I dunno. Am I? Are you?)

2. I am a caretaker, that’s “what I’m for.” 

3. But I don’t have to do all of it, or most of it. There are a lot of caretakers out there. The whole thing is just a lot more complicated than I have ever let myself imagine.

The connection with people was intense and lovely, but I was staggered by the responsibility it entailed. I don’t think I’d ever seen that so clearly before. 

I’m deeply grateful for the Buddhist practices I’ve learned: returning to the breath, letting conceptions go, inviting pain and confusion in instead of trying to fence it out. Nothing fancy. Bread and butter practice. But it was very helpful.

The Special of the Day

Baker Roshi says that the greatest obstacle to enlightenment is the desire for enlightenment. The Zen fondness of paradox approaches, maybe, a vice. But you can see what he means. Once you get firmly in your head a notion of what enlightenment is going to be like, what chance would actual enlightenment have of finding a clear space to unfold itself?

But we’re being too crude and peremptory here. I do sit down to meditate in hopes of a “special experience,” and really I don’t think I would sit at all if I didn’t have that hope. It’s all very well to knock away the crutches of a novice in a monastery who has lots of other things (rules, master, companions, a daily rice bowl) to hold him up. Kicking away the crutches of a homeless man is quite another thing.

I do want the experience again: the sunrise through the dripping twigs, each random twig picked out by the sunlight to form a perfect circle of radiance. That tree glittering in the wind, in Olympia, fifty years ago, all the leaves shivering. Of course I do. That and more. I’m a wanty little creature, and life rolls very rapidly to its drop-off.

Seriously, I don’t think I can afford to dismiss the desire for special experience. And I don’t think I have to: I think I just need to hold it lightly. I do wonder if psilocybin might give me an experience to steer by. A jolt, a reminder. Of course, you can’t order a psychedelic experience like you order your breakfast at Tom’s. You get the special of the day, Honey, and you sit there and eat it, whether you like it or not.

Nor Elephant Nor Cat

Indra’s elephant, pure white,
Has three heads, six tusks,
Except some say ten tusks,
One for each direction
(Eight, you know, plus Up and Down)
But I think it more suitable to give him
Two tusks per head, plus
A unicorn on his middle head
Threatening to split heaven, giving us
The pleasing number of seven
Cornamenta. Then picture
Indra’s famous net, flung
And settling over all that
Beautiful and deadly ivory,
Carelessly yet just so, shrugged
Back like the shawl
Of a model on the catwalk.
Elephants are not cats, except
Some say that they are: it’s just
The speed at which you perceive them
That varies, and which end
You start from. (Don’t try this at home.)
Each jewel would burn our flesh, we
Being neither elephant nor cat,
Altogether unhorned, and
Of minimal dignity; still we are
Invited to this party, slower than the cat,
Faster than the elephant, and subject
To sunburn and ulcer as we are;
Our job apparently to sing, or maybe
To clown: the instructions
Are unclear.

Three Things

1. Replacing mindless scrolling with reading. I think this has been… about halfway successful. I have to remember how little reading I was doing before the current push. I was reading, say, two pages of “hard” stuff, maybe five pages of Spanish; I think I’ve doubled that, and added in much “middle” reading, things such as Atkinson’s history, Jules Evan’s ecstatic experience book, Marshall Sahlins’ swan song. I am reading much more, and it is very rich and fertile reading. Really I think the main thing that remains to be done is not so much to increase the hard reading or the middle reading, but to swap out the scrolling (YouTube and Facebook “shorts” are particularly noxious) for music. The solutions to the other discontents, perplexities, and problems are not to be found in reading more intensely, or reading more widely. You’re doing that. It’s not going to give you people to pray with or sing with, and it’s not going to expose you to ecstatic experience. It’s just not. That’s not something it can do.

2. So there, you’ve just delineated it. You want people to sing with, people to pray with, people to dance with, and

3. You want to be inviting ecstatic experience in a responsible way (but not in a guarded way: the distinction is crucial. You can’t invite the Goddess only if she promises not to make anyone uncomfortable. I mean, you can; you do: but wondering why she doesn’t come, under those conditions, is idiotic.You know why she’s not coming. Get real.)