Rhizomorphing Thoughts

“I’m here to disappear, “I’ve said… The writing confirms the fragility and unbearable beauty of our existence. Its purpose isn’t immortality. It’s more complex and interesting than that. It’s discovering life at the edge of death, all the time.”

Anne Waldman

Writing is life at the edge of death-- this is an amazing thought. All the time, us living at the edge of death, the razor edge of existence. Yet, life eats entropy by being alive, being the universe’s r(evolution). Life is the very evidence that the universe is ultimately curved towards peace. We eat entropy. We are the curve of the universe bent on peace.

The other day, I was at my friend Alice’s in her Fells’s Point row home backyard, plants creeping from patio edges in an envelopment of summer. I was transfixed with the chipped flowerpot/urn that her cat, Monty (lived to 20) is presently buried in. I remember the night that I had helped paint the urn before a Spring Equinox party; Monty’s body then still frozen in Alice’s freezer. This urn and a Jesus statue half-hidden among hydrangea captured my attention. Both objects seemed to have found their true form in the weathered raw. The Jesus had been found by our friend, who’s best known as YogaChristy, salvaged from a suburban pile of trash in Florida. Christy brought him back to Baltimore to find home with Alice in her yard. I thought the headless Jesus was really perfect that somehow in acquiring age and being chipped and worn away, it seemed that this statue had found its real self on the verge of entropy. I commented this and Christy said that by losing his patriarchal head, he was able to reveal his heart. His hands at his breast opening the folds of robe, to reveal his true center, stained a quiet, persistent red.

Black suckers of grape vines clinging to walls, remnants of Alice’s attempts to redirect the growth over her fence—broken-- the vine had spilled its sugars in libation on the ground. I looked at Alice’s house turning a little ramshackle between the newly side-paneled neighbors. Her home an extension of her, the persistence of her sweet, unruly, and occasionally scattered heart, like a scattering of seeds, fecund, in the dark. She told me earlier in the afternoon of a message she had received. A message that she believed to be for me. This message is a gift. It is why I write now, occupying this edge, feeding back open Heart.

These days I keep saying, “Everything is so exciting.” It’s a meaningless throw away phrase, except that I don’t mean it in a meaningless throw away way. I mean to say that this feeling in me is multiple directions, roots and shoots at once and head on. It manifests as postering Evolver fliers around town, a money collage cutup for the Beyond Money spore, as I tell people that Evolver is like a bridge between spiritual and political communities. It’s about promoting really good and worthwhile memes. With the tools these memes provide, we can begin to bring about an evolution of consciousness. It starts small as seeds.

Evolver also, for me, is a bodhisattva mission. Sitting in meditation the other morning- I had the idea of traveling out to Iowa to see if the lama, who I took refuge with, would give me my bodhisattva vows. (Except that’s not meditation. Momentarily in the thought but not in the space between them.) When I sit, I fall in and out on my breath and into spaciousness. Yin and Yang. Yin the space of inner reception. Yang the space of outward mobilization. I breathe in Yin and extend out Yang. The seeding of useful memes, the groundwork for community creation/interaction is also a Bodhisattva mission. And I’ve been reading Anne’s Vow to Poetry. Books are teachers, she says as I work on my own. Pour out the corner of my eye- flash out reflection- tuxedo cat- moving between worlds, in and out, crisscrossing circles flux- writing hybrid because I want to sit in the point of hybridity. Life drives me here. Breathe.

I came at this point of realization the other day. On the train, primitive dinosaur compared to Shinkansen bullet, coming back from an interview of sorts, an entrance into performing ayahuasca works. I realized that I need to claim my past—my active charnel ground and point of transformation. I need to accept my roots, the first roots of my childhood to see what these roots can teach me about interconnectedness. I feel that there is a continuity between the destruction of our natural environment; the ravages of war in Afghanistan, Gaza, Honduras, Iraq, Sudan… the quiet dumb, numb of suburbia; and the ghost of tension people carry for years hovering over or hunched in thick, blind muscles. Ghosts forced into ghosting, in a world where spirit is ignored, where charnel grounds are desecrated.

And I learn more about these grounds reading Anne Waldman, one of the founders of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, A New York School poet and Second Generation Beat. In reading the storm of Anne’s vision, practice of her life/action/dream, I have felt the need to burn toward her legacy. Silently reprimanding myself in a desire to catch up to her long stride of prolific epic work, fierce negotiations with Tantric Buddhism, and endless familiarity with all manners of written word. Wednesday, I knew that I was off target. It wasn’t about striving to meet Anne as Anne, though it’s worthy to have teachers who inspire higher ground. (I hope that I do the same for my students.) Rather, it was about meeting myself as myself, sitting with my own transformation of suffering.

As a Buddhist, I do believe in the first Noble Truth even when I feel inclined to rail against it: Life is suffering. Under the best of circumstances, and few circumstances are best, we all struggle with our own challenges. While it captivates me that mentors, such as Anne or Daniel grew up in worlds full of so much culture, I understand that it’s still a struggle, and my personal journey may be worse than some, and possibly still better than most.

Mine was a suburban home, surprisingly flat and fragile. Like weak chains in the link, my baby boomer parents didn’t experience any of the 60’s expansion of consciousness. During the Baltimore riots my father had been in the National Guard. He was one of the soldiers inside the domed center when a machine gun had accidentally gone off, gaping a hole through the ceiling. At times he chuckled telling the story, the “darkies” he had said (the African American men and women who had rioted in response to Dr. King’s assassination) fell down to the floor, believing for an interminable minute that fire had opened on them. And my mother must have had the disease even then. I imagine that she was sweet, deferential, and never and the sharpest pencil. Yet as her schizophrenia developed, a failed suicide attempt when I was a babe, she now lived mostly overmedicated and asleep on the couch. I’m astounded in remembering, what it was like to live like a ghost. The ghosts that I had wanted to see but never managed much to glimpse, were in fact, saturated all around me. In the processed foods, the lonely atomization of family, and the numbing static television void- whole summers and school years lost. And so much endless rocking, my sister, Jenny with Downs Syndrome and me also comforting myself with my own internal rhythm, rocking myself into dreaming and through dreaming, dreaming myself awake.

I write to express my wonder in growing up in the nuclear, nexus of broken American culture. Like peering at something fractured from the inside to glimpse and understand its parts. A shaman is a wounded healer. I may learn about shamanism yet, and the important thing is recognizing the teachings of wounds. Healing, for myself, and also the world. Microcosm to macrocosm. What was broken at home has also been broken at large. Nuclear energy, “clean” coal, mountain top removal, greenhouse gases, melting polar caps, peak oil, endangered species, economic meltdown, nuclear meltdown-- endangered languages…. Is there a finite way to count these things? I feel that they are one convoluted thread that runs-- continuous.

Yet, I write this history to express little r(evolutions). My faith in everyone’s ability to arc back to who they (we) really are, finding our natural forms as we open ourselves to the cosmos through the path of our hearts. Rhizomorphs, dendrites, roots, branches, and trees. Proliferating— wide— deep— the nature in us that is… peace.