Cicadian Rhythms

Outside in the heat, sweating in the shade after civilizing my swamp (the pool is a bit green after a long repose, lookin’ out fuh gatuhs), and listening to the pulse of the Cicadian choral. It's flags and trumpets and signal fires, ridiculously more efficient and rich than what we've used...though it appears we finally caught up (?) this century. An ebb and flow of collective information passing…”haven’t seen your kind in 13 years, how ya been? Good, wanna mate? Maybe, seen any good food? You bet…just fly screaming in any direction till you hit something...and hey, you need a new wardrobe.” High decibel unmanaged perfection. Good times for Entomophagists; nature’s apology for hard scrabble days.

Makes me wonder…we give and get information in strange new ways that seem more insectile every day, e.g. the Internet as a uniform non-discrete medium for everything the tv/phone/newspapers/magazines (conversations intentionally omitted) could ever do. Some folks look askance on the last things, analog and face-to-face; too much television (aka big monitors) or too much phone (chat and email), but get the same set of requirements met through the keyboard and monitor while also substituting safe-harbor social networking for the brutal realities and effort of visitin'. Cro-Magnon looking down and out at Neanderthals? Maybe, but a word to the EEMH's out there...you're next.

What happens when we start to make use of air/water/food for digital information delivery? That seems to be the 2^nd dream (the first is wireless transmission of power, you know, like the sun); to pass information without stone or wood, dance or voice, keyboard or monitor, to instantly add information to the nervous system with no assimilation requirement through the (antiquated?) sensory apparatus we grew up with. Little mechanical and/or organic bugs swimming in a soup of possibility, sharing via micro in the macro...do the 'Information Age' cultural druthers become as passé as pamphlets and radio? Not implausible considering what we know about the nervous system…I think Kim Stanley Robinson and some others have this fictionally figured out (Gibson and the like have a less plausible mean-step mythology, Tofflerian in its naiveté’ to me, more sexy than real): flood the environment with microscopic elements that form information matrices which communicate in near real-time to us and each other, nanobugs that can go right up your nose or down your throat, pass the blood-brain barrier and drop code directly onto the cortex. Helluva lot more complex than that but neurotransmitters are increasingly teaching us the necessary cant, and while we speak like it like a brain-damaged wildling today, we may learn to compose verse and song in the next few generations.

So consider learning and entertainment, news and knowledge all offered quietly, privately to each individual as they navigate the soup-streams of our over-populated ecosystems, quiet whispers of more and better, latest and greatest seductions, waves of popular and necessary rolling across the mass of us, in cicadian rhythm. The ‘do not call list’ is for Luddite holdouts and the irrelevant, the economics should be…well, the same as economics have always been.  You know that death is the result of information failures at the cellular level right? My guess is the channel focused on that 'ol chestnut will be in some rarefied air indeed. S'under discussion already, sign the yearbook.

A Little Less Light

Hatred…hold on, don’t run off, I have some ruminations about this, but the safeties are on.

I used to think hate was simple; emotional charge around loss, mix in some significance fear, self-pity, and la! Hatred. Just Love’s absence? An empty heart? Love’s twisted visage? Most treatments I’ve seen minimize it that way, marginalize it, neuter it…wishful thinking I feel. Now, a little more well-acquainted: Powerful and motivational, leaches the bearer and destroys everything it touches but oh so seductive, warm balm when you don’t like your outcomes. It has its own living bloom, it’s not like spiteful apathetic hurts or cynicism or contempt or rage or resentment…parts of the whole, but it’s the sum of those that rears up as a composite new driving force. Folk pretend to it, but screaming fear isn’t even a meaningful part of what we’re talking about.*

Driving…soft way to describe the navigation and liberation hate allows, probably its evolutionary purpose. Boundaries? fuck ‘em. Ethics? those too. Limits? suspended, possibilities without fear’s weaker face; all offense, you just need one chance to cut. Consequences? You’re the bearer of consequences, the subject not the object. In the full flood of hatred, a new/different/exclusive fund of power is available…you can deny that if you want, but you’re naïve as hell and are dismissed from any defensive position…if you don’t get this you don’t know what you’re doin’ on the wall.

So take all that, add imagination, focus, strategic filters, capability, and what do you get? A Nightmare trotting forward, waiting for a little knee pressure to drive the charge home. Think of it this way, if you could create a living intelligent tangle of eager hating thorns, bright and black with poisonous horror, edged and barbed to stab/rend/tear, a remorseless/ growing/wrapping/biting/strangling/killing urge that had one compulsion…how terrible would you be when that rooted in the loam of your consciousness/heart/center/soul? Fed and stretching out for what it sees, what it wants? Hungry, willing, cunning, nurturing, patient, explosively energetic…sounds like a winning formula for a horrific trial.

Lots of material out there on this from humanist fiction to lab studies. David Kupelian treats it well, but that stuff is usually about a childhood inculcated religious or social intolerance, anti-Semitism, women-hating, etc…not the intimate personal kind meant here Note: he seems to be a little preoccupied with the Islamic folk even though hate has no language or flag. There is a tacit acceptance of the pleasure-inducing qualities of relaxation during heightened emotional  states hovering around the clinical treatments; if pleasure and pain are the foundations of our behavior…you do the frictional math on Iago's purpose.

It’s a lot like lust I think. Channeling the initial urge, encouraged and supported by dark whispers/visions that visit in fantasy in the deep sleepless night…eventually that urge is a welcome, warm companion, always ready to come to you and burn doubt and inhibition away for a while, insinuating into emotional habits and muscle memory, laying the foundation for a few seconds of unconscious movement that will resolve everything (that seems to matter till you’re done), promising smooth and effective execution of purpose. It’s not easy, not  at all simple to sustain;  you have to avoid collapsing the state vectors early and wasting it, keep the side-effects under wraps (surprise matters)...the key to that old black magic is deliberation, to be deliberate, rituals of exponential 'not' until providence shows her teeth.

Anyhoo, don’t touch yourself there, you’ll go blind.

*“To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.”

-Aristotle

Idle Murmurs

My cheeky blogmother told me once that I should talk about myself here only in a one-sided ratio favoring shut-the fuck-up-about-yourself-you-narcissistic-journaling-hack…well, she said it much nicer than that, but you get the drift. Not much of a cherry-picking current events guy though; until the history worm gets to process factsoil I find it sterile of meaning, even if hubristic need-to-learn-before-you-teach(ers) pretend to have the future sussed out from their little pool of data points and face-against-the-glass perspective. If I did event regurgitation, it would look like:

"Bin Laden died yesterday, slain by a never ending revenge culture (mine, proud),  some well-trained operators (go Navy, doubly proud), and a big-ass reward (hard currency, what it was really about). Now he’s a martyr? Probably. Did he matter anymore? No, but he owed. Good riddance to him and any of his confederates we were fortunate enough to spray with steel-jacketed consequences, hope we didn’t lose a single good man to destroy a bad one…duty though if we did."

Eh...

Have food blogged my way around a bit to add some taste. Writing about food is easy, about all sensual things actually. Immersive experience, sexual charge, the touch of weather, vistas seen; describing the world as it passes through you is usually worth a few lines, though I’ve seen some insensitive mimicry that’s transparently a copied look-at-me rather than an honest look-at-this. It’s hard to share what you've got without getting painted with that brush, so kept down.

Travelogue, sure, the road version of sensual translation. I have a big trip coming up, Uzbekistan by way of Istanbul (Turkish Air, cheapest first-class), Tajikistan, maybe some Iran. There should be enough input to have some pleasant output, and I’m looking forward to the journey. I’m going alone cause it’s dangerous? and adventuring isn’t really for everybody. There’s something about that Silk Road geography that captures me; the endpoints, waypoints, the viaditch that vast streams of wealth eroded into some hard scrabble country. Tamarlane’s hometown, the Beys’ extravagance, the Soviet cotton experiment (the worst of human greed, bye bye Aral Sea)…bread is sacred there, artisans are still more important than actors, and secular Islam lives crossroads cozy with everything else. Uzbeki is Altaic; vowel  harmonies and agglutination…oh, the linguistic conflicts of having the Turskish languages (Ohguz) mixed with Korean and Japonic dialects in one language group? Now that’s fight-fun rhetorical fighting. To learn some glowing glottal goodness, wrangled the only English language Uzbek teaching grammar I could find and some linguistic training usefulness from the good folks at Transparent. 

Languages...never really been a problem to drink them in. I’m no gifted wonder like some, but communicating seems intuitive once you have the rhythm of a speech. Rules and rationales help, but for me needful use makes the mind get plastic over by Broca and Wernicke's areas. Native to romance languages (with barbaric flavors), have some feeling for the sounds of the Chinese, so this language family really rounds me out. More as the trip nears maybe.

Mary Had a What...!?

Easter...the resurrection; if you read my most pinged vignette, you know where I'm at vis-a-vis the lamb...I have many off-color blasphemies/witticisms for this, I choose to put those somewhere else. Funny though, really, you missed a few chuckles even if you take yourself waaayyyyyy too seriously.

On the context: Any reading (thats what it is, any emotion there is probably a program you didnt write or a gap you had to fill...willing to talk about this, s'not like I know) that moves you to the middle, away from suffering as a crossy extremity (it's not, it's bread and butter, gravity and friction writ large in our synapses, every day)...the pillar of Mercy looks across the body/heart/mind right at the pillar of Severity...she looks back, gazes transmitting information like neurotransmitters in us <-- how's that for anthropomorphising?. If you've got Christian hangups (can you not if you got indoctrinated before you could think/feel completely?)...hungup as in can't reach past the metaphor for the message (which solves many dilemmas, truth in the philosophy without doubt) or can't look at other ways to inform your's cause you're conditioned to consider it cheating,  then you self-deny a host of allies/kindred and friends that have been there, e.g. a Lao Zi, Cleary's translations, the commentary is really the jewel for the Western mind at first, makes it accessible and prevents the inevitable simplifications. Ok, so scared to get caught getting happy soul satisfaction elsewhere? Then try staying inside and touching your spiritual self; some recommend finding hominorder through Origen, Aquinas, St Fancis, St Augustine, ...the greatest hits from when Christianity wasn't convenient, twisted, or neutered. All of those guys can move the needle on understanding that life-is-pain-but-that's-why-it's-beautiful; common theme of martyrdom, imposed or chosen. Full circle to a Golgathan spectacle; self-sacrifice, giving up the little-e go bits bits that rail and protest...a nugget buried in all faiths. Nothing wrong with Easter.

Road less taken: maybe we should just listen to the folks around us radiating inclusive right..."Hi, your light is showing, mind if I rest here...?" Ref: The more methodical ruminations of Joseph Campbell perhaps*? He was  Methodist I believe, so close to Episcopal dogma at the source and therefore an easy palate.

Haters in the story, haters around us right now...so long as they're non-violent we have to put up with 'em as citizens...even though some of us would love to go one-on-one with each and every one of them and talk about why they can only feel significant if they are unlikely central figures in whatever cosmic please-dont-let-me-be-as-small-as-I-feel drama. Some folk can't handle their insignificance, our insignificance, so we ham it up, attach that performing urge to our endocrine system so that we flush with fight-or-flight potions whenever we walk outside, then socialize it with herd-mentality rigor and scream/snark our fear as anger to reinforce it. Passes the time I guess; imqo...those indulging in outrage sans victims contribute nothing but fear and pain, working for the thing they fear the most and dont seem to know it...almost like the Body of us all is signalling that something is wrong...loud little pain indicators, but they don't know where it hurts...will now need penance for my hubris I think, but I mean it...

And the ending/beginning/ending...convenient Eschatology no? Buyin' a literal there? Lets hope not, we all have things to do. Like a dear friend of mine said, it's (define what you can grasp here) been ending (changing) since it started. The inescapable brevity of us, our ecosystem, is a simple fact...the unconsciously-early-now-pretty-predictable known problem has been heralded so many times in so many ways, I'm numb. Shoudn't we all be? For me, I have a real feeling for Northern European spiritual...I dont know...vibrations around this. Ragnarok - Bad guys all get loose and organized by a betrayer (blackest hells for that poor person in all faiths), the champions kill each other off, everything burns down (as ordained)...then, there's a shining new world. Better story than the Four Horsemen dirge; more buckles swashed, dashing and derring-do; real heresy here: also better monsters.

Reiterating: not against any teaching vehicle really, even the most rigid and dogmatic provided extremes are ostracized; my what-you-got rebel was put down long ago. During nouveau expressions of ancient festivals like this egg-laden lagomorphic hijacking of some serious debauchery, since we're dissing empiricism and pretending we're not all scared brainless (the common thread), why not allow any story that howls for a victory? I am pretty sure that there is nothing going on today that is worse than the plague-ridden Europe, the Taiping rebellion, the brutal rape and murder that used to be so sudden and constant for everybody and the God-doesn't-love-us-anymore life-swallowing disasters like Ice Ages, Santorini, the bursting of the Black Sea bowl (sorry for the late addition of controversial cataclysm, but I have to give a nod to the Flood, Easter and all). You know we all love that stuff; you can tell cause even in the these enlightened days, when we haven't had a good plague in a long time for example, we need/want to make up pleasure-only Zombie movies, vampirism as a sexy STD, genetic accidents creeping and snatching everyone but the pretty lead...things we want, cause they're knowable-ish? Expected-esque? Better than the (imagined poorly) abyss if you have vertigo I suppose. Profitable too...another time.

That all said, my plain truth: Doesn't change my world-view; if a giant rock hits us again, the planet or sun hiccups and snuffs us all, we manage to poison ourselves with biologicals, or nano-technology (or other) runs amok...do we really think we have anything to do with most of that? Fight the good fight, do right and abjure wrong, be as happy and content as you can manage, and dont be afraid if that's a lot...health, wealth, and wisdom for and from your friends, family, neighbors...and I suppose strangers and enemies (though I struggle with that last one, my hate blooms and blossoms like kudzu if I feel wronged and it gets out its cage). The message behind a fertility festival, no matter where you find 'em. I never say that out loud really...how'd you do that?

Imbecilic addendum: Mayan calendar?...incomplete social evolution and unfinished math is no excuse to give away all your stuff and go stand in a crop circle waiting for a fiery chariot ride that statistically-speakin'...aint comin'. Gonna be a long revolution round the Sun till 2013 for the chuckleheads that need that kind of drama.

* "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being."

Miami Risotto?

Back to Florida last week; new year (professionally we round the sun in April), new team, new management…basically my company has a compulsive need to demonstrate activity. Not progress, not improvement, not striving to smell like metabolized lessons-learned…just flailing arms negating high-dollar consulted practice (where we are advised to not change for change sake), the same ol’ thing again and we’re new. Anyway, went to Miami, and soon to the Orlando orbit…again.

Now if you remember, I went to Ft Lauderdale and had some lifestyle immersion at the hotel bar. Well, this time was mandofunquestered the entire time. Not a bad thing, I have a rowdy crowd of confederates always willing to create a story or two, and shy…well, not many. Took a bus on night one from Dadeland to Perricone’s. Yes, we went to the continental tip of the Eastern seaboard, 600 years a Latin stronghold, thousands of years of native culinary culture before that…to eat Italian. Was bowed up to throw my thin red sauce and overachieved veal-chicken-marsala-picatta-parm into the most convenient planter nearby…but, lo, the food was good. Dynamite bruschette leading, good antipasta (they are also a food market), well-managed fried calamari with zucchini straws, simple salad, the oh-so-traditional vodkatonicawithalime-a(s) …then, a big hunk of sea bass with a tomato-aged balsamic drizzle on risotto that did not suck. Stepped off the bus dubious, but the place disarmed me right away with a large tented garden for casual dining, subdivided with translucent walls, large old trees wrapped in lights twinkling, hidden benches along little paths near the street, the warm, slightly humid feel of Miami alive on a Monday night just a few feet away; in short, my inner-creole-cuban-carib-child was comfortable eating something unexpected. Open mic swiped from the driver on the safe-to-be-drunken commute home, impressions and stories, odd urban vistas, nice.

So, another adventure in a state I hear nothing good about, but much enjoy the multiple times a year I go there. Some of our friendliest teammates there, others who may read this that have kicked some sand around there too. Eventually, I think I run the risk of accepting that it’s all good for a careful, well-heeled tourist in NY South.

Surrender

The last of the cycle, the riddle, the winding of the world...do you know?

--------------------

Seen from afar, the marriage of two

Becomes one against a shattered horizon

Closer now, our fingertips lightly pressed

Reach a little, sparks kindled, hinting

Mirrored, amplified and returned

Self-light reflecting from self

Face-to-face, love’s gaze

This is no time to be shy

The world pours through us, so be at ease

The stream cannot be gripped

Time passing, life’s flowing beauty

Bursting, bouncing, swimming, soaring

The source and vessel urges reversal

Counsel to reclaim the ghosts of thought’s confusion

Tame and bring them home

You cannot share what you do not have

And so the patterns are broken

In final happy endings

One motion for both

To find a remaking of bliss past the world’s end

Home again, loving

Home again, growing

Foundations and eaves of grace

Immovable, inviolate haven for purpose, for new fire's race

He Shoulda' Armed Himself...

More on me writing, anyone that doesn't want to get some on 'em, better head on out the back.

There are times in your life (I hope for your sake, I'm lucky, very very lucky) when you suddenly find yourself in a rhythm and flood with someone else; an effusion of conversation and connection wholly unlooked for though not surprising, with a cadence so comfortable that you stop noticing it altogether. Topics range, hearts and minds evoked...curious and real. The natural results are questions you havent thought of - simple questions that bridge what you know with what you say in a way you probably would miss if you were slavish to solitude. Somebody reads something you shared, just a game of pitch and catch like when relationships weren't much more complicated than that, and you glove a question about how you write, how deliberately the noise orders itself to the medium. It drew a thought from me...

I mostly just pour, and any quality of sound that sneaks in is probably cause I'm about half singing some of it...I like a roll repeated, and rhymes remembered...that bubble up out of well-meant waters. I do pass back through and edit out parentheticals that go nowhere, typos (that I notice at least) or word-choices that could be easily misconstrued, but mostly, wysiwyg.

...I'm not obliquely sayin' anything, am sayin'...conversation when it's real, when guard is dropped, weapons are down, rare and priceless... but writing, texting, even chatting rarely makes it there...here. When self-editing is more present than self-expression, personas pass for people and it's a virtual state of words; rhythms and exchanges governed by convenience and sheltered by a lack of consequence; in the ether, no one can hear you erase.

The mind free of gesture maybe? Beautiful letters are a big part of the Western canon, drawn and measured, read with feeling...beautiful even...I am more and more compelled to write day-by-day, even if I sometimes lose the edge of my bladed muse and saw dully for a while. Poetry though is the wild mind-heart truth, I just wish I'd known that in my wastrel youth. <--- that goes on for a bit, doggerel panting for a drink, spared ya'.

Got scolded by somebody (hi HS) for "letting the juice of your writing seep on to too many pages"...and hoarding thoughts...the more I thought about that while raindrop-drowsing (Note: it was raining, that's not a nascent children's story device) last night the more I was certain that's not so. I talk too much, granted, but I get fusion from sharing with people that share back, an excess to fuel my next reaction. Take that o critic of nectar! I thought in thunder, then sleep.

Sub-Sequiturial Salutations

Been a while, not that I'm not writing, just not sharing...hold on, non-sequiturs ahead

Studied Serotonin in college ...conned my way into a Graduate-level course on psychopharmocolgy after pre-conning my way into a Freud seminar. I came away with this: most unusual (to us), unique (to us), inexplicable leaps (glorious and furious) in the human pool can all pretty much be traced back to too much of this or not enough of that, receptors full or empty. Every monkey-one of us needs therapy and some occasional potion support, though we wont admit it. I increasingly understand the simple point about balancing, about homeostasis both emotional and physical (no one here is so foolish to try and separate them, right?) , and I know striking it is no simple thing; I can barely control my own blood sugar (and it's attendant mood swings), and it's easy as far as the pharm goes...hell, I can measure it, get a number any time I want...so I think there are less quantifiable, more uncontrollable life challenges which dwarf any of mine; I feel sheepish even mentioning them in the same sentence...not timid, just aware.

 Recently, some conversations with others (some present) have been about the furia; the feeling, the emotional voltage, transforming, stepping down, too little, too much...I guess I've never had a feeling-too-little problem. I burn all the time (300% more blood sugar than a normal human may play a role), my game is keeping the lava underground and hoping the crust is thick enough for safe-ish walking; making fertile soil if time gets a chance to work it's entropic magic. It comes through when I pour thoughts to media. Some of what I write is imqo light but puissant, ebullient, playful...that's when I'm soothed...some is vitriolic, vicious...it seethes, almost resentful about being restrained or evoked, mindful chaos. I dont make value judgments on any of that, a lot of what gets said is not...well, good, or even readable. Between 'em though, when they agree not to compete for attention, I get this great friction and my best pours up channels and down courses, splashes out to my tongue or my hands.

I haven't traditionally liked all that friction; in me it's been indiscriminate and ungovernable...outlets truncated, ignored, undervalued...a little self-hating maybe? Voices planted in my head when I was too young to put up a fight that are unnatural additions to my clockwork. Pulling myself apart was once my only passion, I went after my bad wiring with both hands (early...too much so maybe?), then I got material and connected and wanted nothing more than to build...now, full circle, so much demolition left undone, and as it turns out I feel more and better when  I've pulled down some elaborate, rickety construct (poor craftsmen in my past fo'sure) and something simpler, more...I hate to say elegant...clean maybe? is waiting underneath. As soon as I start pouring myself through the old/new...that balanced charge I'm looking for gets easier to transmit.

It turns out (I may be the only bonehead that is just getting this) that I need things I eschewed, want things I am just beginning to know, and my feeling in general is not what I thought it was.

I'd standby to standby here...

The Third Turn

Beginning, endings, the discipline of bark and limb

Upright against the wind's insistent conversation

Travelling the world from root to tip

Too much compromise snaps the spine

The mysterious cup, the wheel’s driving surface

Fate-filled, held and released

The headrace froths and splashes

My drought is over

Protecting, pleading, still and needing

Do you have a wish, a hope that raises your arms to heaven?

Drawing down, reflecting back, the surplus of fusion

A devotion made sacred with ecstatic tears

The Sun needs no symbol to see

Walk under her, in her, sultry and gracious

Beautiful face golden-limned

Pale skin blushes to ardent hue

Straight and true

Faith-clad and deft

Twice-bladed and blooded

Ware the remorseless edge

Seed bursting, life shaking, bubbling laughter

The future’s jubilant promise

Cherished, nourished, furnished

The smallest things are most important

Mortal Coils and Life's Demands

Love and sex, sex and love, are they really together? Or is one the expression of the other (who's on top?)? Or are they both just deoxyribo-strategies...the ghost in the machine craving/organizing/managing reproductive friction, and getting it any way it can? You can see my bias I suspect, ideolected to public office.

Don't we all want that healthy, clean, and balanced? Trick question, convinced on 'no'. It seems to me that most build all their ambitions around sex and 'love', literally making them life and death for themselves and others. Cultural obsessions, body shape mania, plots and outlines of emotional ambition, jealous rage and euphoric stumbling...Eris likes to watch. There is hope though that you can be subject to it all (like there's a choice unless you're a bodhisattva) without collapsing into it (wanty/needy enough for two myself); be immersed in it (it = the seductive field that physical intimacy humming with pleasant tension and satisfied ambition creates for mating context), consciously creating it, without letting it control you...so I believe, some sages agree. The tail should not wag the dog, but it almost always does; look around and see the (lack of) value placed on building deliberate healthy and lasting love relationships without a superficial validation requirement...bliss-capable realities competing with hopelessly complicated, ill-conceived (or maybe worse, non-conceived) hormonal ambition; those rising, propped, and falling even among your dearest; fantasy beginnings, Grimm endings. QED.

Worst case we're puppets of the nucleic acids as pure reductionists assert (am no convert, useful base though) right? I suppose there is some logic in doing little but chasing validation while our cradle-to-grave strings are pulled, but no amount of urgency and self-satisfaction will make it a well-spent life (maybe you get a pithy/snarky tombstone quote, congrats on that). Eyes open -  many folks doing little but emotional latest-pleasure-seeking or last-pain-avoiding; generating offspring and propelling them into the future to try and scrub the fallout of damage repeated...are things really so bleak that the fight and flight blinders must obscure a sublime better, a way out of that cycle? Something more than trying to win races already run and games long since over. If the future is nothing but constant do-overs...well, what are you mastering there?

Purpose (what is yours? tick-tock) married (a sacred act, not a legal fiction or a safe harbor) to pleasure (created though focus, acceptance, and attention; it's not fated/accidental/predestined if you own it vs it owning you...see addiction, numero tres)...Joseph Campbell calls that a recipe for bliss, and advises we seek it. NOTE: bliss is irreducibly simple and very hard to get at, so no self-congratulatory 'attaboys just cause we're not scared sometimes. He talks about the sacred, the spiritual; relationships that cut the strings and cooperatively, collaboratively exceed the base, the animal. To be a human being, you have to try to be a human being, and you'll need help. Being born a hominid in the here and now is no fast-pass to meaningful/useful life expression, it's just license to consume and grunt while you do the work (or not). There's nothing different about our present/position at all in that regard.

When you can join the opposites of yourself...and family/friends/neighbors/strangers/enemies, thrive among the ambiguities of captivity/liberation warring in your noggin, and channel heroism without getting it confused with desperation...you have a truly authentic human life. It sounds judgmental, but living all Chokmah and no Binah is bat-shit crazy (romanticized as Emo these days) so suck it up; you choose, you're  responsible, you're accountable. If you want to just scurry, sniff, and flinch while testing out new iterations of your love (it doesn't come from 'other', we generate it right?) till you expire...really?

So full circle?

Love...a spectrum of feeling/experience, but a perfectly direct relationship with it is very difficult (even possible? poets and prophets) to consummate as infatuation and wishful thinking pretend to it - shiny! Maya ya'll, that ain't new. So much preexisting noise and little-e go begging for attention in us all. I hate to say it but the book fairly stitches a Freudian afghan of this together with the a-time-for-everything thread woven into the skein of the passion. The inner child should be remembered fondly but not heard...we shouldn't raise good kids, we should raise good adults ready and willing to create/destroy for more than tingles and flutters, especially in ourselves (lateral props also to Kung Fu Tze and my Moist brothas on this one)

and Sex...wonderful stuff. But...if it's not sacred play (i.e. orgasm-obsessed, tainted with needy validation or control, a means to an ambition)...I'm old enough now to realize (and care when I'm not drunk on lust...happens) that it's often relationship-corroding self-negation. I don't think most folk know or care...understandable considering the distractions; mortal coils and life's demands.

Throw the switch Ybor!

Deep Winter here, so…

How about Tampa? Basic premise: warmth (ice and snow inbound to Mid-Tenn on day of departure), food, roller coasters...Busch Gardens. Stayed down at the Marina (cause I love salt water and boats) and had a celebratory sushi dinner to kick things off, preceded by a pleasant surprise: a filo pastry stuffed with scallops, crab, and garlic in a butter sauce…well played. The sushi was fine, some ngiri (yellowtail and eel), some rolls (without cream cheese…wtf is up with that?); good wine. Pleasant vistas….a scary movie and chocolate decadence for dessert; night finds me sated on all levels.

Next day, coaster day, rain…but I had been clever (for once), and booked a pad day in the middle. So instead of confronting Fla weather (it’s more mercurial than a...), off to Clearwater/St Pete’s. Long story short, started at a most massive used bookstore (300k books on hand), sentimental tugs when old editions of favorites materialize, with an eye out for sorry-we-left-you-behind offerings for the Z; next the Dali Museum -  cheeky, really, this guy was shamelessly comedic and we share appreciation for the cocked hip…walking through his expression, immersing in his thoughtscape as his skills lift off from his 10-year old copying to his 14-year old struggling...suddenly (it seemed to me) the bursting/breaking explosion of talent in his late teens...through the war and exile years and into his late traditional/but-so-not traditional masterworks; quite a trip, great museum; then lunch at Naughti Nancy’s…a tiny little 6-table spot in a quaint Clearwater neighborhood, friendly folk selling some damn fine food. No crab today so the At Choo La was out, but the mussels and clams in Diablo sauce with grilled garlic bread set it up, and the shrimp/chorizo/clam/potato boil knocked it down. Jessi steered (she said she wouldn't judge me if I lifted the bowl of boil broth and quaffed it, so sweet), Nancy herself cooked the food and brought it over, and Corona quenched the thirst while the rain fell down. Great people, authentic grub…worth every second trying to find it.

Temp drops a tad, weather clears, a local NY-style pizza for dinner with a charming little movie...dreams of thrills on the morrow...

Up and out early, mapping Ybor City as part of a dining plot for that night, then off to the park. Chilly for Floridians apparently, the park is lightly attended. Lines are almost non-existent all day; yet another portent that the travel gods are appeased. Montu, Kumba, Sheikra, Gwazi…multiple trips on Kumba and Sheikra, shameless on Sheikra actually, my new favorite followed closely by Seaworld’s Manta. There’s something about hanging face-down for 4 seconds at 200 feet then being dropped 90 degrees in free-fall (more than 3 G’s) before some loops and twists…I laughed like a schoolboy on all of ‘em (even on the Wooden monster Gwazi, which was a violent experience, I felt violated), but that ride had me racing round the line for extra go’s. F U N.

Four and a half hours of roller coasters is plenty, also saw some hyenas and hippos in excellent viewing (rare species to me), one bad-ass Nile Crocodile (he got 2 fences)…good park. Avert your eyes for here comes the heresy: preferred hands-down over the Magic Kingdom. Stopped by the American Victory (a Victory ship of the Merchant Marine, restored lovingly) afterwards…I love naval geometry…an excellent ‘feeling’ activity to wind down from all that tasty adrenaline.

The best? Dinner at the Columbia in Ybor City…I knew the right track was underfoot when passing the historical marker above. A short wait at the bar (established in 1905), then a la tabla vamos. I wont try to describe the place (whole city block, seats 1600 after a multi-million dollar facelift), but it was evocative. A pitcher of Sangria (white (preferred in this case) wine, muddled fruit, orange liqueur, and brandy), the best salad I've had in a long long time, and the tapas de la opción: their Casimiri (organic scallops baked in clay casserole with butter and topped with seasoned bread crumbs and white wine), the Alcochofas (baked casserole of shrimp, crabmeat and artichoke hearts topped with grated Romano cheese), and Albondigas (homemade beef meatballs in a mildly spicy tomato sauce). Concluded with Moros y Cristianos (chocolate mousse and rich Spanish custard in a small clay casserole with shaved chocolate)…so named to represent the marriage of the Moorish culture with the (mostly) Visigothic, you can guess which was which. The wait staff were knowledgeable and versed in service, Sangria and salads prepared table-side. The waiter-in-training was Alex, a big Sicilian wearing a name-tag that read Milto (no one but his mother calls him that), who was happy to attend…his trainer was a PROfessional, thanks Kristine.

That’s enough for now (travelogue is tiring), all effortless home again home again after that. Warm, pleasant (avec voluntary terror), fortunate days.

A Lee Shore

               

Two wholes approaching, joining,

Slipping into balance

Promises kept, trust’s pleasant tension

Clasped  hands softly holding

Tribal flag flying, fluttering in time

Rallied round, rejoicing

All communities fail

But not here, not today

Hail in the cornfield

She changes us

Listening again for the first time

Fields whispering promise when the storm ends

Delicate friction, the mother of need

 A mote in the fire’s breath

Longing for fuel and fan

Pleasure smoldering

Still waters, the glass darkly frozen

Welcome bridges unexpected, created and held

Bliss found across their spans

The ice is thin near the tepid shore

We open to each other in love’s sky

Two hearts circling, faithful, hopeful

Our bodies tuning to heaven’s odd meter

Gyring together, orbits opening,  distance closing

How do you say "Gypsy Abduction Denier" in Sanskrit?

So the weather has gotten cold, sub-freezing for multiple days. I don’t mind one bit, as I am out-of-balance pitta most days…I burn.

So History…I’ve been reading a very enthusiastic work about Yoga, and there’s a lot of history in it…so called. I find a lot of it fascinating, inspiring, but my scholarship is out and I don’t think some of the revisionism in there could be defended. The Vedic history in particular seems frayed and wishful; taking on the gospel that there was a violent invasion that draped an Indo-European Aryan culture from the West over a native people in and around the Sarasvati valley (river long gone, the Indus is closest, misrepresentations everywhere (see below))…I wont go into that, suffice to say there's some archaeological evidence that can't be waved off. Me...a skeptic? Let’s just say you’ll need more than the overuse of “of course” and "it’s obvious that...” to convince me of anything. Cohen’s History in Three Keys…should be required reading at the Jr High level.

The actual written work of the Vedic hymns (that’s what they were) is powerful stuff. The basics are that there are seers (not class-specific), and they sing what they see. They’re not a chronicling device (just), though they chronicle, they’re not art (for art’s sake), though they're artistic, they’re highly spiritual, which means cultural currents can be navigated through them…strange that we don’t get educated about these sorts of things considering the geopolitical and world economic conditions shaping up…we better know this stuff cold if we want to be strategically advantaged when the shit hits the fan in South and East Asia…again. Anyway, it’s arguable that there is a contiguous culture in that geo that is older than any other (yes, even you Egypt), I figure they have some nuggets.

The most provocative inquiries for me are the Western European corollaries that drive folks to some brilliant and/or unsupportable conclusions; seers singing? Bardic. Integral  shamanistic practice driven to self-defending/preserving abstraction by dogmatic religious structures? Church. Even the elements like the Great Cow…? Audhumla.  It makes you wonder if there is a Gypsy form of yoga hiding in the wagon train somewhere; they did reflect from the Indus by most linguistic accounts. Secret Romany stuff I suppose…do you know?