Rusted Zen

No rock can go unweathered. A stone on a riverbed will change. This concept has always struck me as both uniquely beautiful and zen. It is the sound of a bell ringing in the distance. It is the sound of birds stopping their song for a minute or two when the wind blows across your face.

Outside is becoming rusty. It’s the slowly encroaching rust of fall that tinges the leaves and grass. It is an amplification of the golden colors of the sun that signals what will soon be a crystalized blanket of snow. Despite all this around me, I am human. I am holding my hand out waiting for something to fall onto my open palm. Then again, it’s probably already there and gone by the time I realize what I wanted to land there in the first place. Again, a song has stopped.

The human heart beats in sync with the natural rhythm of nature. I would have to think that, when a person gets arrhythmia, it is not the actual heart itself signaling the host to die, it is the human body leaving that which is natural behind, and going dark because of it. Americans have built laws, social rules, ethical practices, guidelines, formalities, habits and voice on resisting and denying what nature has told us is indeed natural. America is addicted to this arrhythmic lifestyle. The food we eat, our social practice of commonly ignoring human emotion, our shame-shadowed sexual appetites that seem to prevent us from stepping off this mountain are all signs of this.

That is not to say that Americans are bad. They aren’t, at least not all; at least not by default. We exist, and morality is relative. What this produces, however, is a series of people fighting for and struggling to find and exist in something that we aren’t sure of. We know we are unhappy most of the time, and we know we desire, lust after something we are told is wrong. We are wrong with good intention, at least for the most part.

What I say is that the cigarette I smoke is mine, even if I choose not to smoke it, which I won’t. I never have, and it is only at a campfire, when the silence rolls in that I will consider smoke in my lungs. Insanity is freely flowing, and I am okay with using it if need be. Insanity is only a problem if you are outside of it, even for a minute.

I’ve written many letters and have gotten no reply. This is probably a reason I distrust people so often. I can’t look them in the eye because they will, no doubt, see me. Infant-like, I’d rather close my eyes and be invisible, even if I am screaming inside, even if I am a caged animal. I need to move past that thought. I need to accept that my desires, my voice, my reasons, my light, my eyes, my warmth, my nothing and everything, my cold fingertips, will not end the world if they are brought out from this still place. Often that voice is unheard, but it is meant to inspire and show something of humanity.

I would rather help a thousand people individually in small, fragmented ways than speak to a thousand people at one time. I lock up. I freeze in a group because it can lack the proper individual response to help them. I mechanically follow a structure, and pack animals rarely do.

This paragraph is changing. Ending.

A new beginning is frightening, and it is that uncommon, fresh angle that can sometimes jam nails into one’s palms. Jesus had a new beginning through the old habit of dying. Breath left him, and he started something new. I have to wonder how much anxiety he had over the whole ordeal. Rising after three days of death was not a societal norm, at least not at the time. These days, we have three day weekends and get no postal service.

Here. I am here. If I light a candle for a different faith, that does not make me a martyr. It makes me human, or animalistically human, trying to communicate through the ringing of a chime to some higher voice. So many paintings here, and dried up paint. So many supplies that are just intention, just heartbeat. Regardless, I have to go for now.

Today is Morning

Today is morning. The clouds are covering the sky in such a way that, no matter the time, the entirety of the day, this day, feels like morning. Birds are out there somewhere, but they are muted and awaiting the arrival of autumn proper. The grass feels cool against my feet and I can imagine the caress of snow on them. Wet, slushy snow clinging to my feet as a metallic cool sinks into my skin.

It’s not fall yet, nor winter, yet I can feel the combinations of a failing summer, the decaying leaf smell of fall, the ice of winter is imaginable. I can even feel next spring, with the plants in the ground struggling to stay awake, or to wake up again, just as I did this morning.

I have been warned of my empathy in the past. I’ve seen compassion taking its toll on my life, but even winter is something to feel. The sun briefly peaks out this morning, but it’s amber in color. All the light is matte and distant. The mailbox is empty and awaiting activity. I wondered if the birds were awaiting postcards from themselves, from their future southern selves.

To plant a garden is a unique experience. There is no immediate reward. It is, instead, like a child where you cherish every step forward while nostalgically remembering the previous one. I put seeds into the cool soil, got dirt under my nails and into my fingerprints. There are swirling outlines of earth in my hand itself now, and that is God without a definition.

So many today argue specifics using human language about who God is, what he or she wants, and the “rules” of living a proper human life. I believe that God is in the expression, not in the repetition of some law or rule. Children, at least before ego, express this, as do many animals. There is a look in the eyes of a dog that can signify something deeper than many words uttered at a pulpit. Oddly, humans deny being animal, but in the eyes of some animals is a true knowledge, as if they are saying that they are in a simple connection to something deeper. Humans call this instinct when animals follow a particular habit, as if the animals have no control over it themselves. I feel like humanity could benefit from being animal now and then. I don’t mean that they should be brutal, but only that they can flow down the river slightly without fighting the current.

It’s still muted outside. Even the cars on the highway nearby are slowed down. The sunflowers in the garden are nodding to a particular rhythm that I can only slightly feel as it tingles the hairs on my arm. It’s not describable, and in case you are wondering, I am an Aries, and that is what I would write onto that postcard.

Lotus

So we sat around the dinner table. Each of us sat in a kind of silence that can only come after years of refusing to emotionally connect. Each of us sitting in our regret and ready to act; to jump, to define, to do something with our lives.

One of my siblings had the same plan millions, if not billions, of other men. He intended to buy a house, some way or another. He wanted to hammer picket fences into the ground and tell everyone how different he was for doing so. He intended to have three children, each identically produced, constructed, birthed, raised, gardened, left in the sun, and eventually pruned with the garden sheers. He wanted a dog but the dog, I imagined, was already hit by a car. This sibling intended to live life by putting a bullet into the head of something important.

Of course, from the position of my chair at the table, and my position that was hunched over the dinner plate, I couldn’t begin to tell you what could be considered important. My sibling’s imaginary dog could be planted in the dirt underneath those picket fences right alongside his dreams. I picked up the unused spoon from beside my plate and lightly tapped it against the crystal. Simple, shimmering percussion. No one spoke.

My parents had married before; my father literally, my mother figuratively to an abusive lifestyle. Divorce, then re-marriage and recalibration. Honestly, I respected them more for their mistakes than any lifetime-married couple. My parents were human, not a picket fence in sight.

I suppose what could be considered important is that walking path that somehow leads to a kind of contentment or happiness. I doubted my sibling would find it, but it was never my choice nor my right. I believed as I tapped my spoon slower and slower that some people on this spinning planet wouldn’t find love. People starving in a foreign country, or this country for that matter, didn’t pain away all their energies over that. People with a true disease, which is to say any disease besides conformity, didn’t have the focus on something as vague as love. Love was and is a modern concept, and it’s often a luxury. Some simple won’t ever find it. There was a fly buzzing and occasionally landing in the mashed potatoes.

I imagined the newspaper being delivered, and the paperboy or paperman sweating into his baseball cap as we sat in complete silence. Wars were being fought. I sat my spoon down in surrender. Each of us shifted in our chairs, then grabbed our plates and collectively and animalistically, we cleared the table. Large fragments of food were then scraped off the plates into the garbage can. People were starving for love, I thought.

The silence at the table migrated into the living room. Dad immediately fell into the nap-state, my non-fence desiring sibling looked out the large glass window of the living room. I could tell she was watching several birds at the feeder. I looked at Dad and say how life is. A pain squeezed my heart.

Birds are incredible creatures. They can go anywhere they intend to go. Of course, because they’re birds, they rarely decide to go an buy a new TV or fly to the gas station for some scratch tickets. Birds rarely lounge on beaches or chirp about how they don’t have to pay taxes and can live anywhere for free. It’s hard not to envy them.

There was a glass of water on the coffee table that I had poured for myself but forgotten. I picked up the glass, which had a galaxy of bubbles in it, and drank it. Many would pour it out and get some fresh, cold water from the tap. Many still would wash the glass or get another. What a luxurious culture we live in. I deserved warm water. Warm water is human in the basest sense. Christ himself likely drank warm water. Though I thought for a minute about where that had eventually gotten him.

I thought some about the Buddha,too. Gautama likely drank warm water. He also begged for his daily meal on the streets. How beautifully human. The idea of giving the control or your very sustenance over to other humans. Just like some men pray to God for spiritual sustenance, Gautama was asking humans to do so on a physical level. What a beautiful idea. I respect anyone that accepts and displays true humanity. People on the street are often more human than the people with flower boxes next to their picket fences.

Gautama and Jesus would have been friends, I imagined. They would have shared fish and told stories. Jesus would pat Gautama on the back and they would laugh roaringly. Broad smiles would come to their faces when they’d meet each other in on their travels. Both of them knew suffering, and knew how suffering connected with humanity.

Neither Jesus nor Gautama would tap spoons on plates. They would recite oms, and each would live inside the musicality of them. I respect the lyrical religions, the melodious ones.

No one concerned with picket fences or paperboys or flies buzzing potatoes could understand the calm simplicity in Gautama or Jesus’s voice. Oddly, many people in America see Jesus as a caucasian man with simple American features. He wasn’t. Jesus wasn’t born in this country, nor was he a composite mix of various progenitors up to this democratic point.

My sister looked at my father as he napped. A look of deep sadness came to her face. I could tell that she was thinking how hard my father tried to fight the dimly human traits while trying to grow the blossoming lotus of that which is beautifully human. Our family was coping and growing exactly how they were able to; no more, no less.

The birds kept flying to and from the feeder as the sky slowly turned into a milky citrus color. I looked again at my father. In the silence, the sky progressed into a darkened blue; the blue of cold stones in riverbeds. I didn’t wake my father up. It was time to sleep.

The Fading Fire

Hello world. I am alone if I can tell you anything truthful. You see, life is often a lie in itself. I lie in life. I living lie. A desperate need to have a voice in the vacuum of this world. The need to find music, song, a tongue, or lips to kiss. I forget all written words, because the only thing on my mind is the animal drive making me seek out another warm soul to comfort me as the rain falls and the beasts circle around me. The fire burns down slowly. I can rest because your heart beats in place of mine. And dreamers return to childhood. I close my eyes.