Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Vamonos! Vamonos!

Electric Worry
Clutch (2007)

Enjoyed the company last Saturday of a small group of people I did not know. Nice enough day with only a little pain. Usual sort of chat around kids and relationships and the motives of murderers. Lots and lots of skulls and little statues of monsters around, along with some crayon drawings of boats taped to the wall. Nice replica of a battle ax next to me.

A guy comes in needing money for food. He has some cd’s to sell and a Cannibal Corpse tee shirt. He’s a regular with the group and my friend gives him $35 for the lot. The guy is happy and hangs out for a while. He says it’s good that he has gotten rid of the tee shirt, because he’s at a place in his life right now where he really shouldn’t be wearing tee shirts that depict dead babies hanging from chains.

My friend tells him he’ll probably hang the tee on the wall.

He tells me privately that he’s found that lending money to friends is a bad idea, so he’d rather just give him the money for the stuff even though he already has the cd’s and he’ll never wear the shirt.

A couple of the men are reading the news on a laptop. They report to us that a well known public individual is reporting that the Boston marathon bombing is without doubt a false flag operation of our own government.

The public individual says he has proof and will present it unless the president comes clean.

The company greet this news with only slight skepticism.

The lady in the group calls home to check on her kid.

My wife brings me lunch from the vegan restaurant next door.

A Devi I know has told me that I should recite mantra during the day to infuse the work with holy vibration. I try, but I can’t isolate the mantra in my mind.

Instead the work is infused with seven hours of metal…

Testament
Clutch
Corrosion of  Conformity

Mantras of the place and time.

You have no doubt surmised by now that I spent the day getting a large tattoo on my upper left arm.

The tattoo refers to the story of a yogi – Bharat, by name – who so loved his pet deer that he could not bear to be parted from the deer, even if it meant another round of samsara.

This makes me think of the gunas and whether the elements of our lives are in a war to determine which shall prevail, or whether it is all a dance of inscrutable harmony.

Are we to discover
the divinity that we have always been…
or are we to become from a seed-potential
newly divine?

Was Bharat’s love strong enough to bind him, yet not evolved enough to free him?

Tat shop sangha.

I should say, too, that the members of Clutch say that the Bang bang stuff has nothing at all to do with guns. It’s emphasis for the Vamonos!

Vamonos!

~

That makes me think of my practice – trying to pour it in the top faster than it comes out the bottom.

I know there’s something bad I should be thinking about, but I can’t remember what it is. It’s not like I haven’t screwed up lately, so I know there’s something I should worry about, somebody I should apologize to. But I get all Bo Peep – loose my sheep and can’t find the little fucks.

That’s alright. It’ll come to me.

I need to do something. Something that if I did it the tumblers would all line up and a lock would drop. But it needs to be something hard. I feel like something easy wouldn’t do it.

I get caught up in the figuring of it all.

If I knew exactly where I was and how I got here and knew exactly how everything works, then I should be able to determine exactly where I want to go, how to get there and exactly when I will arrive.

I have read books and lots of posts on the interwebs and I think about it all and say to myself, Well… now what do you think?

Sometimes people ask me what I think, and I have the audacity to tell them. I tell them, This is some complicated shit!

I try hard or I don’t try at all – I can’t tell which.

I could sit down by a river. I could look out at the flow and make an outline around what I think is me. But it wouldn’t stay. I could watch the river from now on and I could never make it stay.

What good are answers, anyway.

Better to notice how the ground feels against my feet.

Once in a while I have an inexplicable sense of wellbeing.

And I realize that there are a lot of these debates I don’t even want to get into.

I’m always on the lookout for ever better metaphors, but…

I am drawn toward the amusing conclusion that I am in truth a simple man.

~

This is a hard teaching. It is contrary to our sense of justice – but then, what is justice among men.  It sounds weak to those who value retribution. It is at odds with pride and honor. It sounds like a rationalization for not doing the dirty work that needs doing.

I don’t have to look far to find those reactions; I need only look within.

A boy asked the grandfather, Which wolf will win?

The grandfather said, The one you feed.

Iko Iko (Jock-A-Mo)
James “Sugar Boy” Crawford (1953)

So we get to the farmers market this morning and at first I’m not feeling it. The parking lot isn’t packed. Not seeing much hustle; not seeing much bustle. We go on up and it’s kinda quiet. There’s a decent crowd, but it isn’t loud. I like it loud – it’s reassuring. I start over toward the coffee while E gets in the bread line and I run into pixie girl. The outside air has been hitting fifty the last couple of days so she’s in shorts. Got some sort of combat boots on, but those will come off soon since once the ground thaws a little she stops wearing shoes. We start talking about a novel she’s writing and I tell her that I need some new pages to read. She’s got me making an appearance in the story so she asks how I like myself in the book. I tell her that what I saw was an old guy who can still move pretty well, you know… for an old guy. She says cool, that’s what she was going for. We start talking about tattoos and a woman comes by wearing a nice poncho sort of thing. I like it, and I say so to pixie girl. She says yeah it’s nice but be careful, she’s a sensei at the karate dojo and she can kick your ass. I find this oddly exciting. My phone rings and I say I need to take this, so pixie goes off to buy some sausage. I’m expecting a call from a beloved dharma sister who’s catching a plane to Costa Rica so she can assist in a yoga training for the next two weeks, and that’s who it is. She says she’s getting on the plane, and I get that much, but I pretty much can’t hear what else she’s saying because of a PA system which is probably telling her to turn her phone off. I’m talking blind but I take a shot and wish her well, say goodbye and “hang up.” I wander around and say hey to some of the farmers including Angie’s husband. He says she’s coming in pretty soon with the baby. In a little while I run into Angie just getting there. She has the baby but she says she’s forgotten the parsnips. She says for me to tell E that she’s here. Energy is feeling better for me, but really I don’t want to get into better and so forth because I want to look into what’s actually going on like there might be something I need to pay attention to. I talk to Sandy over by the coffee. He’s a dentist and I haven’t seen him for a while; he used to bring his whole staff in for a private lesson once a week. He says they still do what I taught them on their own and he asks me for some advice on his home practice. I tell him to do some easy twisting for the spine, a little forward bending, a little back bending, some good stretching like warrior and end up with a little more twisting but take it easy and breathe through it all like the rest of it didn’t matter. We talk a little about retirement and then his lovely wife comes and collects him. Then I see Omkara and Nitya who are two teachers where I teach and who have just come back from three months in an ashram. Omkara buys me a cup of coffee and I get a hug from Nitya who has colored her hair like a rainbow. I go back to making my rounds and smiling at people I know and people I don’t know but might, and pretty soon there’s not much difference.

Right about now you might be asking yourself what any of this has to do with Mardi Gras Indians.

There are always musicians here and today there are two of my favorites. They each play banjo and fiddle and they trade off. They do a little singing, too. I kinda like it best when she’s taking her turn on the fiddle. She gets into it so nicely, and she’s good. She really gets going – they both do. One of these days I’ll go over to her and  say, Hey lady do you know your strings are smoking, and she’ll say, No but if you hum a little bit I’ll try to pick it up. I just made that up, of course, and it’s an old joke. And today my first time by they’re workin on a reel and he’s stompin his foot and she’s intense and a couple of little girls are dancing. I keep on with my patrol and the next time by they’re both singing and I think, Wait… That sounds like Iko Iko! So I go over and sure enough – Iko Iko. Dr. John would be proud.

It’s a song about confrontation between two Mardi Gras Indian tribes where appropriate threats are being duly exchanged. The Mardi Gras Indians have a rich history and by some accounts have had some fairly serious animosity toward one another in the past. But I figure if the grandmas can sit down together to talk trash, then the blood must not be too awful bad.

So what’s the point? I’m not going to tell you that I know. I suspect some things, but I’m not going to claim any certainty. I do have a sense of movement. But that’s only a sense. Maybe I’d rather call it an experience. I have an experience of rhythm. I have an experience of light and not light and of warmth. Experience requires a body and a consciousness. So I know that I’m a little bit awake.  And sometimes the experience of the vibration forms into an experience that I can name and say hello to. And sometimes everything lines up so sweetly that I can say Love, as in I Love You. And if I had to stop right there, that would be enough. At the same time there is an urging onward. After all, I don’t yet love everyone so there is still work to do. What if we worked for the day when all ill will had been dissolved into a song? That would be worth the effort. But even that thought takes me away from this moment when I am writing to you, trying to tell you what I can. And I don’t want to idolize that either. So I think I’ll just stand here and watch the little girls dance and listen to the lady play her fiddle, while my sweet wife is over there loving on Angie’s baby.

Let it flow
Let it blow
Let it fais do do!

Check the links, y’all…

Dr. John

Dixie Cups

Neville Brothers

Wikipedia Article

<>

Note: This post was originally published as “Iko Iko” and hardly anyone came over to read it. So I changed the title to “Trash-Talking Grandmas” in order to make it sound more interesting. Thank you.

The man uses a power wheel to do his sharpening. No doubt that is the tool to use for the task he has, but I would not put my Dragonfly on a wheel. I love that knife. I carry it every day. It’s the best pocket knife I’ve ever had. But mostly I love it because it was a father’s day gift from my kids. That wheel would create friction, and friction causes heat. And I don’t want any heat put into the edge of my blade. Of course the steel in that blade was once molten. It was transformed and tempered by fire. The finished blade is cold.

I read that Krishnamurti was having a conversation with a friend, and the friend said that he felt like he was on fire and what should he do about it? Krishnamurti told him to pour some gasoline on the fire and let everything burn up. Then watch and see what arises from the ashes.

It’s been said that we should practice like our hair’s on fire. That’s an image of urgency, don’t you think?

Most days I feel some urgency. Some days I also feel some fire.

I don’t do this to comfort myself. In the past, maybe. But not now. Now I want to get uncomfortable. Overthrow my status quo. Break some chains. Disrupt some patterns. And I know that none of that shit’s going down without a fight.

I’m feeling a need for heat. Burn my fearful, ego-bound, compulsive mind to ash. Use the heat to forge a cold blade. Call that blade Discernment and use it to cut down between the true and the false.

What can I tell you – I’m in a mood. I’ve been trying to reason with X. Tried loving it, tried accepting it, tried forgiving it, tried ignoring it, tried embracing it… And I think I might even have suggested once or twice that you do the same. So carry on if you can. I’m not complaining. But it just may be that I’m not ready for the loving approach to my bad habits and compulsions. I still love you and everyone I can, of course. But the next time some X shows up we’re throwin down. Mano a mano. I’m ready to RIDE on this shit.

A pledge of honesty has compelled this report to you. And as always, Dear Reader, we should examine the wisdom of listening to a frustrated man.

I’m out.

Δ

Like when the other villagers come around and say, “Nothing personal, Old Dude. But you just don’t mean that much to us anymore. Off you go.” And then they put me on an ice floe and leave me for polar bear chow.

Do you ever feel like that?

I’ve heard that a true yogi is content to live as a hermit and die alone, knowing full well that no one will ever remember that he lived.

Just thinking about that makes me lonely. Is that where I’m trying to get with my practice?

It may be that I think too much about where I am trying to get.

I can try to think like I woke up in a Himalayan cave this morning. But that’s dropping a made-up non-reality onto my mind. And my current mind wouldn’t decide to be a hermit. So, I can’t think like a hermit.

Maybe hermit consciousness doesn’t get lonely.

If I look right here with the consciousness I do have, I feel separate from you and from everybody else. I have relationships that are important to me. But come right down to it, you are not me and I am not you. I’m set up to feel separate, crave relationship and fear its loss – all at the same time. I’m set up to fear my own core loneliness.

The old yogis said that ego – asmita, the “I” maker – makes me feel that way.

I am in relationship with people who are not me. Those relationships tell me how I’m doing. If I am loved and respected, if I am useful, then I feel good about how I’m doing and I feel like my life has meaning.

And if I lost those relationships…

There isn’t much to say about one point in space.

With two points in space there is relationship, and I can talk about what it means.

One point in space doesn’t even have an observer.

Falling back into that ego-separateness that seems so ultimate. No refuge in the loving and affirming relationship that gives meaning. Adrift on the ice floe.

But I learn from my yoga practice that separateness is an illusion. It comes out of a mistake I make about my own true nature. I mistakenly think that I am a free-standing, free-floating, self-creating, self-existing individual without any necessary connection to the all. The truth is, we are all interdependent and it couldn’t be otherwise. Thich Nhat Hanh says that we “inter-are.”

We are of the deep common.

Indra’s net – An infinite number of faceted jewels, each infinitely reflecting the infinity of reflection in each of the others.

In time, my practice will shift my consciousness toward realization.

For now, I want to be loved and needed. And not that I want to change that. My practice is not a practice of not caring – it is a practice of dropping my guard.

I may have some understanding of these matters, but we shouldn’t count on that.

I go to my mirror and I speak to my reflection, saying…

Do you withhold love from the loneliness you feel? That makes it ache all the more. Better to pull it close and speak sweetly. Is there no one around to reflect you back to yourself? Love need not be reflected in order to know that it is. Love surpasses reflection; it is the ground of your being.

I mean those words; they are as true as I know how to make them. They give me comfort.

I must lose interest in my comfort. Spiritual practice cannot be on my own terms.

Success may come disguised as failure.

If all goes well, I expect that one fine morning I will find myself forced onto an ice floe, listening for the soft splash of huge paws coming my way through an icy sea.

grrrrrr……

*****

Now there is this report: One member of the tribe – a young girl – is a poet. She writes beautiful love poems. All of the tribe gather each sunset and listen heartbroken as she tells of love lost and love won and love that never was. Even the most callous among them weep for her tenderness.

Everyone calls her Treasure.

I’ve been wondering whether I should have sent them all a Valentine.

My right shoulder hurts. It’s been bugging me for a year or so now. I’ve tried two different types of physical therapy recently, and if anything it’s gotten worse. I figure my pain-free range of motion is down by about half.

So, I’m about half pissed off.

There are other things that bother me. I’d have to turn the lights out and go down to the basement, get on my belly and do a low crawl underneath all the other crap I keep down there in order to come eye-to-eye with some of that shit.

I’d be happy if none of this was on my mind. But it keeps coming up – my shoulder gives me a stab; somebody reads something on my face or in my voice and says, What aren’t you saying? and I don’t want to talk about it.

• don’t want to think about it
• don’t want anyone else to think about it
• doesn’t fit with what I want to think of myself
• doesn’t fit with what I want you to think of me

Something in my…

• experience
• attitude
• behavior

that I don’t like
that hurts
that I don’t want to claim as mine

But I know enough to know I want some movement on this. So it gets me thinking about what wholeness means, and healing.

There’s that bible story about the guy who cashes in his inheritance and leaves home. He walks away from all his responsibility and goes on an extended binge. One morning he wakes up at the bottom of a pig pen hungover and broke, sleeping with the hogs, and says to himself, Whoa. I might have messed up. So he goes back to the farm, because he’s got nowhere else to go. His brother sees him coming up the driveway and thinks, Man, the old man is going to tear him a new one. Instead, the old man throws him a party.

One of me is sleeping it off in a pig pen somewhere.

I don’t want you to know who he is.

A few weeks ago I posted about a recent experience at Kripalu (Hit Me With A Brick).

At first I thought it was a bad experience.
Then I thought it was a good experience.
Now I just think it was intense.

I’m still receiving lessons from all of that. And one of those is that there is always something going on that isn’t about the circumstances.

We can walk around in pieces, embarrassed or hurt or angered by this or that aspect of ourselves, postponing contentment until that elusive day when all is resolved – no more bad habits, no regrets, no more achy shoulders. I’m trying to work a different way. I’m trying to stop calling parts of myself bad – or good. When I sum something up that way, the summing up itself changes the experience of the thing. It starts expectations developing that cloud my view. Once I call something bad, it gets hard to see anything but bad in it. Same with calling something good.

More important is to bring it all home. This calls for nirodhah - cessation. I want to cease discontent.

I’m thinking right now that this bit of consciousness that I am has been given the great gift of existence. I have body, mind and spirit – life in this beautiful world – and it seems a bit arrogant to say that some part of it doesn’t meet my expectations. The straight-arrow brother in the bible story had some entitlement issues. (His father led him to light on that, so no worries.) Maybe that’s my problem. Doesn’t matter. I can put that problem together with all the others and say, Welcome home.

This is not to say there aren’t things to work on. But I want to work on them without prejudice. My basement is full. I need to start bringing things upstairs. There’s a Rumi line – Joseph looked ugly to his brothers/ and most handsome to his father. I want to be the wise father who sees the beauty in all of his children.

And from there… to see the beauty in all and everything.

Krazy Kat receives a Love Tap from Ignatz

The past is inevitable. I thought that up a while back and, apart from it sounding clever to me, I didn’t really see much in it. I know that sometimes when I look back on things I think, Okay – I see how I got here. But saying that the past leads to the present is sorta obvious. So, I throw that little phrase out there once in a while, but I haven’t really worked with it.

Last week I was at Kripalu with a group of openhearted souls whom I adore and to whom I bow. We work with Swami Kripalu’s instruction to teach from life experience and from love. The first principle is love.

I’m going to digress for a moment… Patanjali wrote in the yoga sutras that the phenomenal world is a world of experience that exists for our edification. We can experience the events of our lives, learn a bit and leave it at that. We can also go deeper into that experience and move toward realization of the Self.

I came into the week with things on my mind. The sessions in our group can get intense, and they can amplify what’s on my mind, and there came a time when the intensity peaked for me. It was all I could bear. I thought I was going to blow a fuse. I ran into a wall of simple truth, and it wasn’t even new truth; it was shit I know very well. But it came with such a hard edge. I tried to change the subject and I couldn’t. I hated the experience because of how bad it made me feel.

We were supposed to talk about our experience afterward, but I couldn’t face doing it. I couldn’t find any words. I couldn’t get purchase. So I clammed up.

By the next morning I had calmed down and I made my report to the group.

Sometimes I get caught up in what the story says, and I miss what the story tells.

The events of the week were exactly what I needed. The events brought about an experience that contained a lesson that I had to get. The lesson was a simple truth that I’d been able to dodge until now. And the intelligence manifest in the course of events had become insistent about my getting this lesson. So a ton of bricks was dropped on me in order to get my attention. Fair enough.

From the experience itself, from the chain of events, from the way it went down I’m catching on to two things among other things…

1) I’m always offered what I need. Always have been. And I don’t always have the necessary awareness to see the truth and to accept what I need. But truth is eternal and it will out. And if I can’t get my lesson from a butterfly, then eventually I’ll have to get it from a brick. Hard head = hard lesson.

2) If it is true that so far I’ve been getting what I need, then maybe I can afford to have a little more faith in the unfolding future. Particularly when things don’t seem to be going my way.

I don’t want to rationalize suffering with this insight. I don’t want a slogan that I’ll become attached to. I don’t want a reason to be passive. What I do want, is to see as clearly as I can the teaching that is in front of me. And I can’t do that if I’m being fearful and insecure.

My life will go the way that it must according to how I live it. And everything that I need for this moment is present. The difference in the course of my life will be made by whether I react to my experience with narrowness and discontent or whether I take my seat in love and welcome the truth.

A couple of years ago I became a part of a group at Kripalu known as the Acharya Intensive. There are twelve of us, plus our two teachers and several assistants. Swami Kripalu said that one who teaches from life experience and who teaches from love is an acharya. This program is meant to transform us into ones who teach from life and from love. In honor of  that journey of transformation, we were each given an acharya name by our teachers.

The name of Bharat shows up often in Indian lore. Bharat is a king, the brother of Rama, as told in the Ramayana. Bharat is even a name of India herself.

There is a Bharat story that I feel close to. There was a yogi named Bharat who had retired to the forest to practice in seclusion. One day he rescued a fawn that had become separated from its mother. Bharat took the baby deer to his hut. He fed it and cared for it as it grew, and in time he came to love the deer. Bharat loved the deer so much that at the point of his own death his final thoughts were of the deer. Final thoughts are important. You may recall that as Gandhi was dying from an assassin’s bullet, he chanted Ram, which is a name of god. Because Bharat’s final thoughts were of worldly things – his love of the deer – he did not attain nirvana. In one version of the story he was reborn as a deer. In another, he was reborn as a man with memory of his previous life. That man was determined to not repeat the mistake of his previous life. He lived as an ascetic and renunciate. To be sure that he was not tempted to any attachment to others, he went about unwashed and naked and pretended to be insane.

We can become so lost in our love of the world that we are unable to move on.

I’ve decided that I oughtn’t wait until I am comfortable wearing a crown to fully receive my teachers’ gift. It was a gift given to me as I am.

So henceforth, Dear Reader, I shall sign my posts as Bharat.