Departure - What The Orphan Knows About Light

[Photo by Warren Falcon. Flaming Thorned Heart of Jesus, Mexican Image In Simone Bar & Grill, New York City. Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Opening quotes to season the offering below, giving contexts or pretexts:

"What I find most astonishing--besides that belief of mine, which never ceases to surprise me by the very fact of its surprising lack of unpleasantness, the belief that I might very easily, as they say--lose my mind one day, not that I suspect that I am about to or am even...nearby...for I'm not that sort; merely that it is not beyond...happening: some gentle loosening of the moorings sending the balloon adrift..." - Edward Albee. A Delicate Balance.

"If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything." - Hermann Hesse

"Who has twisted us like this, so that--
no matter what we do--we have the bearing
of a man going away...so we live,
forever saying farewell." - Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” - C.G. Jung, this was carved by Jung on a stone at his tower in Bollingen

**

for Anna Kamienska**

'I don't believe in the other world...But I don't believe in this one either unless it's pierced by light.' - A. Kamienska

From the Dream Journal:

"Dreamed this morning of everything, everything, falling apart in a large loft where I live in dream which is a cave, too, earthen floors of light clay, adobe walls though the loft is in New York City. A surprise visit from an overly "spiritual" man, a "healer," a wellness doctor, one enamoured of magic and magical passes which gives him pass in the "Best Seller Spirituality" world. He enters my space with two of his children, a girl of 10 and a good son, 14 or near, who serenely smiles over what begins to happen. Everything the girl touches falls apart. The bed, the sofa, the stove, the heater, every single thing she touches disintegrates, breaks, and all the while the spiritual man smiles widely as does his son. I begin to panic since the gas jets from where the stove used to be are flaming largely and there is broken wood all about from fractured furniture. I am frantic to turn off the gas but there is fire in some other corner shooting out as if from a flame thrower. I scream for the spiritual man to do something and he just covers his daughter's ears as if she is too delicate to hear the screams of someone whom she is doing great harm to, breaking all my things, making where I live uninhabitable. The adolescent boy seems curious about it all. He is sweet, smiles and pokes at things with a stick. Next, I am suffocating. A young man I know who has once been seriously ill, once near death but has recovered but still suffers negative side effects from the treatment, is lying on top of my head and face and I can't breathe...he is very, very heavy. Dead weight, though he is not dead but asleep. I push and paw and hit him to wake him up, to get off me, to indicate I cannot breathe. End"

Very late last night I made reservations for Mexico. Haven't been there in over 3 years. Need to go. Have been short on money so no trip has been made since 2009. But now, no choice, I must go. A shorter trip but will have to do. Must rest. Am drained, overwrought, and as the dream indicates, am falling apart with little or no control. Oh! at the very end of the dream, just remembered it, a strange scene, black and white, with Charlie Chaplin on a very high ladder trying to repair a section of ceiling which is collapsing, or about to, in an old brownstone but he's only making it worse and is trying to hold up what remains which is falling in chunks and slabs. Suddenly the entire ceiling falls and down from the precarious ladder goes Charlie into the debris, covered in white dust. He sits bewildered, blinking, dust rising up around him in big, billowy clouds. He looks so ridiculous and pathetic that I wake up laughing, a little insanely but I laugh nonetheless.

Well past time for Mexico. And a visit to Betty, the curandera/healing woman, the "real deal," as they say, who has been seriously ill with cancer, the healer needs healing. And I will go to Betty no longer in that formal capacity as healer. I'm done with all that, the grandiosity, sincere, yes, but extremely grandiose. And the rip off of indigenous cultures to be turned into Western spiritual commodities-as-entertainments is just too offensive to me. Consumer spirituality, turns out, is not my cup of joe or tea. Perhaps it's my stein of beer but I am ahead of myself here. The stein is to come a few paragraphs below. The rip off of indigenous traditions by spiritual consumerism is one more thing I feel guilty for, a personal and collective guilt, now beside the old Christian Fundamentalist who resides within me making his lists "de mis culpas (of my sins)."

Eat me," I say to the list maker, he then minds me that I "must become a Catholic and eat the Lord."

"Oy. Whatever. Bite me."

I dust off my aura, pull out my credit card (OY again) and purchase the flight to Mexico City, my city, refuge where I have often dragged myself to rest and recover my shadow/my self, bright colors there, brassy musical sounds and klaxons, puttering VW bugs (bochos) rattling the walls, industrious workers pointedly scrambling, a rich culture/art/symbol system, archaic & Catholic authentically struggling in great human conflict, large, looming, the privileged rich bunkering-in, the very poor beginning to rise up but tempted by big, easy murderous money of cartels and the oblivious narcissistic North Americans with white powder up their spoiled recreational and/or soul-starved noses, with blood, much blood, of indigenous peoples (ongoingly, in keeping with past Euro-American history) upon their entitled hands. In spite of all this, much good living, hard but good, gets done...the great earthy food aflame with chilies, and lovers aflame, o the lovers everywhere holding hands, kissing, pushing baby carriages, arms around abuelo/abuela, papa/mama, tios/tias, compadres in arms of each other, touch-ers men with men, women with women, all the combinations innocent or not, all licking cones, ices, ah, I hope each other, just right, a return to sense and senses. Human. A place for me where I can live much more comfortably in my skin which I have never ever been able even as a child to do in the USA. So I return soon to my wholer self, humble, grateful that there is such a physical space for me, Mexico, where I really require nothing of it for myself but only a little space free to disappear within, relieved of having to be.

I am thankful for the Charlie Chaplin ending to what was a nightmare I was struggling to awaken from. And have been at it, struggling to wake up, for 3, 4 years. A Saturn Return. Yes. And a cosmic dyspepsia "caught" long before that from chewing my gorge as the gap widened between me and the New Age mages and sages I once "pussy-footed" with (no power animal implied)... Good old Chaplin is needed to make light of my being too too serious about all these matters and uber-sages. "Too humorless," the diagnosis. Humor is the prescription. At myself. But the insane laugh I awakened with disturbed me so much that I abruptly stopped, fearing that I was indeed finally over the edge, or close. Definitely halitose. As Edward Albee's character, Agnes, says in the opening quote above, I am, to be frank, quite close to madness; at least there is madness at work in the dream last night announcing that "the balloon," mine, is more than adrift and some process is set in motion bringing the moment, drifting and, one presumes, a falling to its crisis or crossing with madness chewing like a chihuahua at my heels.

Adrift is the Chaplin image and, replaying it, of his valiantly trying to balance on the very tall, swaying ladder, grasping at a swinging chandelier while trying to stabilize as well as support himself and hold up the ceiling with one hand all at the same time, one leg stuck out behind him like a ballerina caught in a stage rope going up and up fast fast as the curtain comes down fast too too, gets me laughing again. And my belly softens. That's a relief. Rather the soft belly than the soft brain. Insane, yes, but some mooring, the Self, is near, perhaps the sky is a mooring, wreaking havoc, yes, but one hopes for the better. Jung said, "One must give up the good for the better," and I shall see what this Self-havoc has in store for me, to what mad end my drifting intends.


Seems I've been leaving a lot, a life theme really--departure. I was born only after 4 hours of labor. Thus began the going, going, adios, get me outta here to some where and there which I shall probably be leaving soon enough--a puer thing?. Still, I'm halitose which belies some earthiness. Now, finally, maybe, I am departing the grandiose search, the Chaplin-esque lurch for omnipotence in the falling apart world, the ceiling collapsing all around me, the heavy once-was-ill-too-depressed-from-the-illness-experience-young-man suffocating me. Oh snap! And I've had bad asthma for the past two weeks now. Duh. Here we go. Dreams are damned good, know how to give the real story in all the wheeze and "god-almightiness if you pleez." I've been "working air" as friend Joan says of asthma, the work it becomes to breathe makes one very present and concrete. And blue. And the dream provides some meaning to asthma other than just outer dust and a consumptive spirit: there's grief afoot. Grief is about departure, yes? And as anyone who knows me or reads some of the newsletters or essays here, I give much weight to dreams, the one real "thing" that seems to really mean something in all the dumbshow of my grab-atting and scrab-ladder balancing acts, holding on to chandelier which is grandiose lighting, for sure. Oy. Humbling.

Around the time of being fired from a religious facility I once taught in, I dreamed of a gigantic, overladen, bleacher-like altar, New Age for sure. Trungpa Rimpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist guru/teacher who immigrated to America, writes incisively about the "spiritual antique shop" which much American "baby boomer religiosity" has become and is even more so now (note that Trungpa took full advantage of the "spiritual antique shop" and the curiosity of the boomers searching for something other than variations of Christianity). My dream altar was jammed with collective symbols, statuary, rocks, crystals, projected-upon objects of desired power indicating some spiritual arrival, all purchased in spiritual "supermarkets" for the hungry-ghost "boomer" consumers residing at the polluted Western pool of Narcissus, long gazing, addicted, at selves reflected but not infleshed, real, substantial. I have most certainly spent way too much time in this "antique shop" (and beside the pool) where one commits to the spiritual delectables displayed for purchase as one does to the hankering of the day for a certain food item, today the potato salad is "it" but tomorrow "it" may be the tuna tartar and on and on, the only commitment is to taste the various offerings. This is puer religion at its "best or worst" depending on how you look at it, the puer (the eternal child) tastes but rarely commits, and this is so in "boomer religiosity." There are, of course, exceptions to the puerish samplers in the antique shop, those who have committed to one chosen path and fall into the pool of Narcissus to sink to the depths in order to find themselves truly. Such sinking is initiation into self knowing. And the death of faces which are now false to fact, no longer authentic, and need to be shed.

Understandable how I wound up in the "shop" after growing up in Christian fundamentalism where one is forbidden entrance to any shop other than the only "real" store in town, the Christian one, specifically the Calvinist flavored version, other versions were considered "ok" but don't really deliver the whole authentic meal due to inherent heresies of various sorts. Now Calvinism is a bland meal made tastier by the flames of hell flickering at your toes if you don't discover (or pretend) the glories of "meat and potatoes" with margarine. Grace is this restrained, emphasis upon strained, narrow occasion offered to all, supposedly, but only a few have the one or two taste buds, doled out abstemiously before time, pre-ordained to the chosen few, to really find the taste, the gourmet gush and rush, of boiled meat, boiled potatoes, the gravy will come later at the messianic meal to come. In Calvin's rigid offering no other options are given other than "it's this or hellfire and damnation."

Hard for a kid fed on this pinched meal to even look at the other items on the menu. Long story. Suffice it to say, I did eventually nearly die in Calvin-Mart, "the only real store" so went into chosen exile to first recover some orientation to self and basic life, and then began to pull up both weeds and planted produce too firmly rooted in my psyche, those roots wrapped around basic fears of the old brain, the reptilian "hard copy" in the human nervous system. Hard work, weeding. And then the question remained, "what to plant and nurture?" And the antique shop looked like a place to visit, maybe even purchase some things, used, yes, some seed packets, exotic plants grown in other lands and soils but now offered to planting here in the "new land" of the Americas...the "shop" gave some energy to my returning spiritual ambition to live in conscious contact and context with Mystery in the material world with a nervous system, instincts, needs, basic existence in skin and also in mind often at odds with skin and all it keeps zipped up inside, thus the need for underwear and napkins, soap and lye.

This dream altar described above, a version of the pool of Narcissus, was located in the meeting space of the religious facility. It began to sway and I knew there was no way I could prevent it from falling though I tried (in Chaplin-esque fashion recalling the dream now). As the thing swayed and shook, groaned and rattled, I tried to stabilize it but nothing doing. It was going down. Just as it was on the verge of total collapse I impulsively reached out to grab something from the altar, to salvage something. I remember seeing a Buddha head tilting sideways mid-fall but my hand bypassed that beauty and impulsively grabbed instead a little souvenir from Switzerland, from the Western world, a tiny beer stein. And down went the altar into a pile of rubble and dust.

I stood there in my underwear, an "inconvenient truth" more naked than not, of which dreams freely dole out, brutal truth, cold and precise, without mercy, BEHOLD: tighty whiteys, covered with dust billowing up from the rubble. Bewildered, I held the little stein tightly in my hand. In walked two of the faculty (flakulty, as I referred to the unhappy, always whining crew not content unless their heads or feet were up their own or somebody else's arse "for the good of the probed one, squared," of course) whom I felt were the most inflated and overly-identified with the guru/messiah projections they pulled for and got from students and aping disciples. Sneering at me, noses literally up in the air (it wasn't the dust), they passed me by, heads turned away in shunning fashion. I noted that there was no charge at all, no feeling either way about them as they passed. They were dumb but colorful hobby fish in a child's small aquarium. Slicking back my own fins and gills, I happily walked to the front door for fresh air, dry land, terra firma, REALITY, blinking Chaplin-esquely, opened it, brushed the altar dust off my feet in good New Testament fashion and left once and for all, thinking, "Now, you must get some clothes on and then make something of this stein. No turning back which would be regressive sure." While waking out of the dream I heard within the words of a Bob Dylan song, my favorite, "You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last/But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast/Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun/Look out the saints are comin’ through...strike another match, go start anew...It's all over now, Baby Blue."

"Well, at least there is a match, what remains a'pocket..."

Grabbed stein in hand. Match stricken. Even so, departures are not easy. They are damned hard. The firing and the collapse came at the end of what had already been occurring in me for at least 6 or 7 years before the actual denouement. Good riddance to all that. But the inner departure has been slow, more a "ridding, here, there, now and then," as there is that inner Chaplin (a play, perhaps, upon "chaplain" since it was a religious institution I taught in after all, and I am a now, ironically, a titled "reverend") who is so naively, bravely invested in doing the impossible, attempting, at least, to keep the sky from falling, and that overly laden altar in his head and heart.

Now. I don't really like beer. I'll drink it if I must, a dark bitter brew goes down best but it's not my beverage of love or choice at all. I'm a wine drinker. Some tequila makes me scrappy but happy. However, I did not grab a chalice from the altar, nor a shot glass. I grabbed the little stein, a Swiss stein, and in my undies headed away from the New Ager-gods-and-goddesses-R-us comic book illustrated, fluffy world, yet another "spiritual province" tried, tasted, and come to not much at all in terms of planting a spiritual identity flag, pouring concrete around it and proclaiming a temple my own. Makes sense though, the effort, to balance the negative inflation ("I am a worm, a wretch) of Christianity a la Calvinism and other conservative flavors served up from Catholic to Protestant. Low to high, mud to sky...as James Hillman says it in his "Puer" book, "Peaks and vales." Exhausting. Draining. Notice, too, how it's all vertical, up and down which are the same thing depending on where one is heading on the heavenly ladder. Notice there is no horizontal, or not much value given to that dimension. It is, rather, to be escaped, risen above, sublimated, transcended.

But the stein means "stone" in German. And a stone implies weight and ground. Horizontal. And horizons. And Switzerland, peaks and vales notwithstanding, of course, is the very palpable land of my beloved Carl Jung who I am convinced is what this grab-stein is all about. Jungian psychology and dreams, and a non-grandiose working and living out of and within "the symbolic life" on solid ground, the good earth, the creative play implied in the heady joy of beer drinking, the molding and shaping of clay, of carved, sanded stone into containing vessels for beer and the enlivening it can bring here and now, an intersecting at the horizon line of the 4 directions and above and below which together make a circle, a sphere, here here. Here-ly/highly creative work, the royal road of dreams and working them is an ancient "trade" of "consciousness craft-workers" in all cultures though all ages. The alpenstein, so-called in Switzerland, or white stone- (alpen = white, thus the white snows which name the Alps) -stein is a symbol true. Beer in a stein is an everyday/everyman-woman drink of the masses, the workers, the "volks" of the world. And thus this little stein/stone, a worker's cup for inductive brew - beer is a goddess drink made of Her distilled grains and in some cultures, honey - keeps one in touch with the world, this world, the hard work of it where (no matter what preventions are taken, prayers made and actions forced, prescribed rituals performed and charms laid out) things fall apart, fall down, and one has to do a walkabout for awhile in his skivvies, staying close to the instincts (the "only-skivvies" image symbolizing instinctuality, creative organs and principles less filtered/disguised, skivvies a kind of container, too) but looking for the right clothes (symbols of adaptation to life) which make something of the stein/stone of one's life and self in response/obedience to the Self at play mercurially.

Just a word or two about white-alpen which a Jungian analyst recently pointed out to me is a color signifying the feminine principle, the Material, Earth/Creation dimension, the archetype of the Great Mother. In alchemy white can signify an alchemical phase called the albedo or the whitening which is a pulverizing, the making-most-small, the refinement to dust or fine white ash, white foliated earth, thus a symbol of a process of incarnation, materiality, matter, mater refined (and still or even more earth without devaluing the baser stuff, the gross of earthiness, what loving mothers do all the time with their "beloved little shitters and snotters, sleep blotter-outers," love, love (while taking deep breaths for patience), patiently refining, no matter the effluvium/the muddier, with and out of/up from the primitive consciousness of the child nurtured/channeled into ego, conscious self, thus become self-known creator and maker responding to what presents within and without rather than "only-just" reactions. And one cannot incarnate without a mater, a mudder, a mothering into the matter, and that mattering-forth which dreams (a form of desire, we touch upon logos here, the nous, the mind, the idea, the creative seed and masculine principle, entelechy) of bringing things to matter that matter in and between the deep blue see and me. No matter without a mater to matter us with the aid of a fructifying "falling" other, masculine (principled) white earth, a purified (cooked, fired) materiality principle. Add this white to the stein/stone grabbed, perhaps even stolen, the cup itself then becomes an alchemical vessel in which the process unfolds/infolds which ensouls matter and matters soul on earth, ensues ensouled, once a meta-matter, into the realer in need of metta (compassion), itself hard, once fallen from heaven in need of earth, the clay and the "say" of its experience here upon/within harder/here-er stuff..."hard nose, the highway," as Van Morrison sings it, the way it is or appears to be, and certainly is real upon and beneath the skin.

Jung carved upon a stone (see the quote preceding the essay) in his garden, some words about an "orphan, alone but found everywhere"...in the text of this Jung-stone the orphan describes in part itself as "a white stone from heaven" fallen to earth...there is no room here for an extended amplification of this heavenly white stone's pointing-to (what symbols do) but to say only that it falls to earth "mortal for everyone [incarnated in and as everyone], yet is not touched by the cycle of aeons.” Falling is an image of coming down from above into material reality, incarnation, what is called coagulatio in alchemy. This process marks the dynamic and moment when the high becomes low, ideal/idea/thought becomes act then takes on/brings about material form, limitation, quality and quantity, time and space (in this case thoughts become "things" or are capable of bringing things into material being as extensions and expressions of ideals/ideas/thoughts), giving material and symbolic (symbols are real!) heft to what was and is etheric, the "very or too light" and, limited in its "too-lightness," needs/longs for the low, the thinginess of mind and substance, form and function, compulsion, compunction and a bursting forth into some ever new expression from the conflagration come from mind and matter, spirit and flesh, air and earth, and on and on in these couplings, the opposites.

Poet William Blake says it very clear, that this "too lightness," let's call it Eternity, "is in love with the productions of time." He tells us in many of his poems to take care of the orphans, the lost children, the abandoned ones, the abject "littles" and "lambs" who seek reunion, inclusion and the effusion to be found in the "gardens of love" where uniqueness, individuating ones, can play and grow where "down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind. And...have God for [their] father & never want joy ("The Chimney Sweeper")"...And love implies a longing for completeness brought about by the other than it- or one's- self which is not a static congealment but one which endlessly in prick-and-puerperal principle reproduces, not just exact copies but diverse, overflowing cornucopias of "little ones," varied, variant, verily valuable...Blake says/insists/counsels us to "tend to the little ones..." Thus in our tending eternity "falls from heaven, a white stone" to be an orphan stone, say, carved in Jung's garden speaking of these things imbued with and displaying reality, stones, hard, real and more real.

My little alpenstein of dream partakes, I think, in this mystery, my little mind, very small, can barely grab/grasp the preponderance of the small which gets low down and willfully refuses a King/Queen's crown and throne except that of "the prince willingly turned the pauper" choosing his/her stone upon which to sit and rule the ant, "a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity [Ezra Pound, Canto 81]"...

Crowned bairn of the barn, the chimney, the alley steep, wears the wreathed crown of pricks which downward brings blood, blood which affirms the reality, the here-ness thick, thusness of incarnate existence, wickedness a vital part, too, Eternity's lover, and vessel, and "shapely mind (consciousness)" with prehensile, yes, tail and hands/tales to give form and forth-ing to and of and for and with the "ten thousand things" which, O Buddha, sorry, are indeed real and not just false products of baseless mind, mere projections/ghosts, mere epiphenomena but rather these things, hard pressed down provided, provisional, base mind and matter ever dividing the swarming swarm teeming torn between the one and the many which partake of each, one or many armed. "Things that have hands take hands," says poet, Theodore Roethke, and thus eternity needs/makes hands/minds, takes hands/minds which take, too, take back, grasp, grab and delight/suffer the grubbiness of the reach, and the consummations thereof. Love plays and is played out in sequences and ever hints to that which extends love, greater's love, the more. But to dwell in "Love Abstract" and not act in tongued and lunge-ed love, is a bore. White stones fall from heaven sure in the need for dirt and time. Love there in the muck and the wash is love all the more because not "pure".

One, then, grabs a little suchness from a falling altar in pretentious postures ("Pull down thy vanity"), a white stone in the hand suffices a mystery, leaves the fishbowl one has confused for the universe, is driven from or abandons yon local central hill and value, a centaur wandering in skivvies and bones, an orphan alone yet everywhere, Kansas (is) Kansas even though "Baltimore gleams in supernatural ecstasy" (Allen Ginsberg, HOWL) yet "in woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons [C.G. Jung].”


Now, the dream stein is a souvenir. And souvenir is French for a remembrance or memory, a memento, keepsake or token of remembrance, an object a person acquires for the memories the owner associates with it. Dream work a la Jung (and others) involves working with memories of one's personal past as well as the "remembered" archetypes and symbols of the unconscious. Memories go deep. One reaches, excavates, as do dreams, for personal and collective memories, symbols and their associations which show up in life in order to ken meaning of things beyond what "just presents" but are precisely for what is presented here and now in a life. And dreams are progressive, intending growth, development, advancement, renewal and generativity/creativity. And most importantly, relationship/relatedness, I and other, I and not-I, I and (even) I...dreams expose often enough how we avoid relationship of all kinds (O Narcissus) and thus intrude/relate to us at night or other "in-trusion" which insista on relation. The goal is not grandiosity and escape via dissociation/inflation but the work is grand in the sense of most important and meaningful and available to one and all no matter class, age, education, cultural or spiritual caste and, apparently, species. Animals dream but to what end we can only speculate. As do we. We are caught in the speculum of the dream, the unconscious and may gather another view toward being and relatedness which serves greater and better purpose to more than our own species.

And my little stein/stone is just that, little, small, not very big, won't hold much so it keeps me practical and present with just who I am, Chaplin-esque grabbing at things to stabilize but they do fall. Old orders, structures break apart, burn, come down...and one walks about a bit dazed like Charlie, who nobly picks himself up, smooths back his hair, dusts himself off abit kicking up greater clouds of schmutz, coughing and sneezing, stepping out of the rubble head held high as if to say, "I meant to do that...now where's my valet...?" The I Ching says of the small thing, in Hexagram 62, Preponderance of the Small: Success. Perseverance furthers. Small things may be done; great things should not be done. The flying bird brings the message. It is not well to strive upward. It is well to remain below. Great good fortune.

In many myths and religions it is the small, devalued thing of little repute which accomplishes the large, the great task or goal. With me we shall see but I have suffered the disease of my culture, god-almightiness and the need for acclaim. I hope I am done with all that. The dust and the wheeze may indicate some arrival for the departure from Olympus to where I am now, a dusty studio apartment counting pocket change for Kraft macaroni, 4 boxes a dollar at the Dollar Store. Life is good. Cheesy.

Seems I am often enough departing things, grandiose religious schemes and structures even of the spiritually advanced (or so they think)...my dreams have me regressing or re-vancing or de-vancing, and my own ridiculous pomposity is, really now, to be laughed at. Last night's dream of the wellness doc/spiritual healing man with his destructive "daughter of the damned" makes short work of my loftiness...seems the healing is in the destruction of nothing less than everything, the wholeness is in the breaking apart, the departing. Into the hinterlands once again or perhaps just to take up simple residence where one is and give up the pretensions and insolent grasping. Either way, I gotta breathe. And deal with the old rags once too proudly worn. Perhaps the most appropriate things to place upon any altar anywhere. Dylan again, "The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore..."

Fine with me. Perhaps tis Chaplin rapping, the repairman with his too long ladder and wobbly walk, very wary of ceilings, continually misspelling and misjudging gravity, who really makes me happy because human is all I ever am and shall be, an utter/eventual cloud of dust, scattered ashes, in Mexico at a highland spot most special to me. Thus, heretofore, or try, I'll be Chaplin-happy humping my way through the lumps and dumps carrying the remembrance stein/stone of the Self, even Its continual breaking apart into some other thingness held in the mind if not the hand which is memory unto wholeness/holdness with holes and cracks still here/there/somewhere or not, announced by a slight wheeze from too much collapsed altar and ceiling dust inbreathed, asthmatic and baby blue.

****[Some poems of Anna Kamienska:

http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/kamienska.htm