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A World, A Part

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I’ve been combing my hair with a part on the left side since I was a little boy. Maybe I was just doing what my mother did.

I do perspire profusely, and in hot yoga my rug gets soaked. It’s particularly pronounced in the inverted postures, with all the sweat on my back running down my neck onto my pate. Lest it run down into my eyes, upon standing my habit is to squeegee it off my crown from left to right.

I realized last week that when I did, I was losing mental focus – becoming more emotional. That makes sense, in a way: the left side of the brain is analytical, the right intuitive. But with the realization came an image: the movement of energy from a male bastion to a female cluster, weakening the former.

So I decided to start parting my hair on the right side, just to be sure that I’m not favoring one side over another.

I wonder what consequences I’ll confront?

Abominable Candy Box

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I don’t have very many dreams any more – by which I mean stream-of-consciousness random-association imagery. My dreams are normally “visions” – conversations with other personalities that have a purpose and coherent outcome.

So this one took me by surprise.

It’s the end of the world. You know – disasters happening everywhere, people cowering in fear, bizarre monsters running amok. I am floating over the world, trying to figure out how to help. A distant harbor beckons, and when I reach the shore, I see a huge Valentine’s candy box float up out of the ocean. Yes: it’s heart-shaped and says “I Love You” on top.

I hesitate a little, not quite sure what to expect. I mean, it could be Pandora’s box, right? But a little nudge compels me to take off the lid. Yup. It’s full of abominations: slime-covered worms and twisted millipedes and gaping jaws grasping eagerly for sustenance.

The voices of the crowd scream: “Kill them! Kill them all!” But my face twists in befuddlement.

No. No, these too are God’s creatures. We have to learn out how to love them.

B-duh, b-duh, b-duh, b-duh. Dat’s all Folks!

Again?!?

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Jesus once said:

Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to rest.

I go many places, seeking to find a community that will recognize the opportunity that I represent. I’ve been in church meditating on the cross with my eyes closed, and when I open them the pastor said: “Every now and then the elders have to ask someone to stop coming to church, because they sexually harass everyone in the place.” At dance celebrations in five venues, people’s hearts have cried out for healing, and when I clear a space in which they can receive the love that is their right, organizers voice a similar complaint.

I try with the t-shirts. The one I dance in says “Danger: Angel gateways. Please play nicely. They just want to be friends.”

I used to put it this way: our society’s experience of masculine love is so impoverished that when people receive it, they go completely haywire. They have expectations, and project them onto the intentions of the lover. To me, it’s like being raped.

It is convention now to complain that the problems we face are due to “patriarchy,” but few recognize that the divine masculine is no more present in our culture than is the Divine Mother. That female spirituality has been driven out of the cultural limelight is actually an advantage in that regard: they practice their arts quietly in the background. But a man that dares to do the same is rejected and hounded.

Simpler forms of life have a certain clarity in that regard. Knowing that I seek nothing for myself, they flock around me. When a community gets it right, they press inwards, and then ask me to project the pattern outwards into the world. They want every fish, bird, animal, flower and tree to know what it feels like when people surrender their self-seeking and instead offer love. They want to know where it is safe to invest their strength, strength far beyond human strength, strength established from investiture in the earth over billions of years.

That is what I meant by “opportunity”: I am an amplifier pickup. Through that connection, people have the opportunity to make a serious dent in the problems we face. What most choose instead is to say “Go away.”

Little Creatures

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As I progress through the video series at Love Returns, I’m having more and more trouble keeping myself anchored. Time and space, life and death, nature and design: it all winds together more thickly around my mind.

At Dance Tribe on Sunday, I felt disconnected, as though some part of me was missing from the experience – or something else was in control. Half-way through, I focused intently, and found myself thinking about the phytoplankton whose shells are dissolving. While higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide warm the air, causing the most immediate threat to human civilization, they also increase carbolic acid in the oceans. This is bleaching coral reefs and impeding the maturation of phytoplankton.

Phytoplankton are the base of the oceanic food chain, and the greatest source of the oxygen gas that we breathe to fuel our metabolism.

Their message was simple: “We can’t do it any more.”

I fell into a deep-rooted grief that built until I was concerned that it would disrupt the celebration. Taking down my gear from the shelves, I headed for the exit, only to be stopped by these lyrics:

Black lives matter.
Children lives matter.
Police lives matter.
Judge lives matter.

The grief spilled over, then, and I started sobbing, face turned to the heavens. After a time, another man leaned his head into my shoulder. I finally pulled myself together, set my gear down, and went back out on the floor.

It was different. My muscle cells seemed to float as though on an ocean swell. Bones forgotten, it was all about the tissue rising and falling, until I tumbled over onto the floor.

And then the second phase: protective tissues. Lower extremities anchored firmly as though to the ocean floor, my arms and head swayed in the air, fluid, the currents of the air rolling along and around them.

The then the final phase: shells, the calcium accretions that became our bones. Joints and alignments came into focus.

In Psalms, this echo rolls back from the Messiah:

I am less than a worm.

Not less, in that moment, but of and from. They are still inside us, those simple things.

And they are dying.

In the closing circle, we were asked to state our names and offer a word that summarized our experience in the dance. I blurted out my name, but concealed that word that was presented to me.

Destruction.

Things Beloved

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ThingsBelovedI went out to Ventura yesterday afternoon for my Bikram Yoga class, and discovered that the Saturday afternoon class had been cancelled for the holiday. A picture in the window of a new second-hand store had caught my eye on the way up Oak Street, so I decided to check out the shops.

At “B on Main” I found two things. The first was a little silly – a ceramic glaze rendering of two mermaids. It’s hanging on the wall right now beside my other feminine objects. The others are objects of power, and they needed some lightening up.

And I found this. The store has a number of these messages, many of them about parenting. It reads like a child’s braggadocio. But my response wasn’t that of a parent. It wasn’t remembrance of my sons’ innocent declarations of affection that caused the lump in my throat or the flash of warmth on my skin.

I don’t buy things until I figure out where I’m going to hang them. Walking up and down Main Street, it occurred to me that this should go on the wall by my pillow. That’s kind of prominent, so it’s been working on me overnight. At first I thought that it was a declaration of my love for the world, and then I realized that it was a list of things that I loved. From there, it was only a short step to realizing that the qualities were not a description of my love, but descriptions of the things.

So now I read it:

I love the sky because it is blue enough to protect us from space, but not so blue that the light doesn’t get through..
I love the moon because it is just far enough away to move the ocean tides.
I love the sun for it is just warm enough for life to survive.
I love kites because they are the size for a child to fly.
I love the ocean because sometimes it is shallow enough to swim in, but other times deep enough to keep secrets.
I love trees because they are tall enough to give us shade.

And that is how I love all of you, dear readers. I love you for what you are.

The White Lady’s Regard

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My surrender to Christ began when I revisited a Catholic Church in 2001. Confronted with the image of Jesus’s suffering, I reflexively put my hand on my heart and held it out to him, offering “Use this for healing.” It culminated just after my forty-ninth birthday when, while commuting to work, I felt him reaching out from the cross to find a means of anchoring his will to the future. His conclusion, just before his death, was “our heart is beating still.”

Revelation 19 talks of a bride for Christ, a woman clothed in “fine linen, bright and clean (the linen being the righteous acts of God’s holy people).” That’s often seen as metaphorical – the woman is the Church. But my experiences lead me to other conclusions.

Out at Love Returns, I’ve been elaborating the nature of the Most High as love that seeks to heal. Healing requires two parts: change (which is masculine) coupled with preservation of that which is good (which is feminine). Jesus was the manifestation of the masculine impulse for healing. But he cannot manifest the feminine role.

So where is she?

When asked why I don’t have a lady in my life, I answered for a time that “I haven’t found a woman strong enough to stand up to her sisters.” The most godless book of the Bible is Esther. I mean that literally: God is never mentioned. The book of Esther is the story of a woman that uses her sexuality to secure political power for her people. It is the surrender of the virtue of Israel’s women in the same way that the men surrendered their virtue when ignoring Samuel’s warnings against raising up a king.

It is Esther’s compromise that John and others decry as “fornication” – intercourse for political and financial gain, rather than as an act of love.

The union of the masculine and feminine virtues – the celebration of sex as an act of love – is envisaged by John as the New Jerusalem. A river flows from the throne of the Most High down the street and enters the Tree of Life “growing on either side.” The leaves of the tree are given for “the healing of nations.”

Of course, those with political power seek to prevent this manifestation. They have corrupted our understanding of sex, advertising it as a carnal affair enjoyed most by people with rippling pectorals and bulging mammary glands. The conditioning is reinforced by religious hypocrisy that teaches us that those that succumb to sexual attraction are immoral.

The spirit of female corruption lurks in my psychic shadow. It comes on to me early in the morning, parading before me the women in whose hearts I find the most beauty. Some of them are uninterested, but when a lonely heart is found, the dreams turn to sex. Over the years, I have learned to respond in this way. “It is your heart I honor. Where is this passion coming from?” And behind them I see the females that guard political power, the culture that John describes as “Babylon” and “Mystery.”

And I make it clear that it is the bride of Christ that I seek – the woman in whose womb will be collected not corruption but rather virtue.

That didn’t work – none of the woman offered “Oh, OK. So how do I become that?” So I did something different last night. I sent light into my throbbing flesh, chasing away the corruption, and above and beyond the woman that Babylon had pushed upon me I found Her. The Sacred Mother. The White Lady. She looked down on me and smiled in favor.

Oh, ladies. Why are you so frightened by her?

Kevin Graduated!

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I spent yesterday afternoon at UCLA waiting through the commencement ceremony to KevinCapAndGownget this fuzzy photo of my son in line to be announced as having earned his baccalaureate in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. He was recognized as acting President of the IEEE club and received Student Welfare recognition as well. Now it’s off with him to Google next month. (Starting work the day before my birthday. Happy coincidence!)

Final Advice

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Kevin – eldest son – is graduating in three weeks from UCLA. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do for his graduation present. I’m conflicted, naturally, as he is heading off to Google and will probably be making more money than I do next year.

Overcoming that is the richness of the experience that I had parenting him. That role has attenuated over the last four years. But there are wonderful memories. They start with keeping the Legos sorted in the drawer organizers so that he could exercise his imagination knowing exactly where the perfect piece was waiting. They include the two boys whacking each other on the butt with tennis rackets after stuffing their Pokémon comforters into their one-piece jamies. They peak with him lecturing me on morality at dinner at UCLA during his sophomore year – myself taking great satisfaction that he had internalized the lessons that I offered him a decade earlier as we struggled through a destructive divorce. And they conclude with me becoming aware of his painful struggle as IEEE president trying to manage a 300% increase in membership, and wondering why he hadn’t called for advice.

My first intention was to put together a scrap book, but the memorabilia ends with elementary school. I considered buying him a piece of art, but that’s such a personal choice.

As I considered this problem over the last two weeks, I’ve had occasion to ride down into the crafts section on the Santa Barbara Art Walk, looking for Olga Hortujac and Rio, two new presenters. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what appeared to be Native American banners. That came with a strong pull to stop and take a look, but I pushed it off.

Yesterday, though, when I stopped to explain my quest to Steve Richardson, he recommended that I visit Neal Crosbie’s booth. His directions were explicit, and I found myself at just the booth I had been passing.

The first thing Neil asked me is what I did, and I told him “Love people.” Pause. “But if you mean ‘How do I make money?’ – writing software.”

Neal does primitive drawings with crayon – not pastels, but actual wax crayon. They are demanding pieces: crude stick-like outlines filled with delicate detail that is overlaid with chaotic sprays. The visual focus of each piece is a blocky figure with expressive eyes and knobbly knees.

Neal writes an aphorism onto each piece. Fittingly – as he labels the figure “Coyoteman” – most are tongue-in-check. That Amerindian god seems to channel through Neal. We spent a half an hour together while I picked two pieces for my son, laughing merrily. How good a time we were having was related to me later by Steve, who told me “the laughter in that booth went all up and down the Art Walk today.”

Primitive art has the quality of not imposing specifics on the viewer. It is thus a potent means of expressing relationships.

So I have these two pieces for my son.

The first “Fuck It Cross the Great River” evokes our scouting experiences, my pride in the courage he demonstrates, and an exhortation to project his virtues into the world.

CrossTheGreatRiver

The second “Art is a Form of Hypnotism. You’re Welcome” encapsulates my hope that he will learn to swim in the deep pool of mysticism that I navigate.

ArtIsAFormOfHypnotism

Congratulations on your accomplishments! I am a very proud father.

My Little Voices

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I’m going to be 57 in a couple of months. I’ve tried to gather the wisdom I’ve been granted in this blog.

I say “granted” because I am conscious that it’s not mine. When I wrote the introduction to “Love Works” back in 2008, I remarked

I have benefited again and again from “private conversations” with people both living and dead. I am honored by the association with their company.

Sometimes that’s beneficial – even if a little later then I’d like. After I posted “Extinctions” last week out at Love Returns, I had a voice come in to observe that hemoglobin is red because it combines iron with oxygen. So when John spoke of the oceans becoming “blood,” he may have been seeing that bacteria that bound oxygen to iron bloomed in the ocean. That’s a stronger interpretation than the one that I offered – but I wasn’t about to go back and rework the clip.

I’m tired.

Part of surrendering ownership of all of these ideas is that I am also conscious of interactions with personalities that work to push me down. When I posted Trial-by-“Fired” last week, I had also put a comment up on the Washington Post site. The Republican retirees that haunt cyberspace put pressure on my employer to try to discipline me.

Whatever. F’em if they can’t take a joke. Even if the joke IS true.

But more typical are these voices: when I post a comment on a pretty lady’s site, the thought “See. All he wants is sex.” Or when I check my blog stats at work “You’re just a click whore.” They used to be loud, but they’ve become quieter. They can’t help themselves, but they’re trying to avoid my attention.

I don’t give energy back to them, so when they broadcast into the space of my intentions, I heal them. They are dissipating.

Every now and then I hit a powerful reserve, though. These are things hidden deep in our subconscious, in our Freudian behaviors. When I finished taping this week’s video, they came at me hard last night. The ancient reptiles: “He’s telling them everything!”

Yes, I have been. For a long time. But they enjoy their fantasies more.

Everybody wants to be God of their own world. Nobody wants to contemplate how much effort it takes to clean up afterward.

Yeah. “Bruce, Almighty.”

The Tide Pool of Selfishness

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Watching Donald Trump serve as president brings up a memory from my elementary school years. The Cub Scout pack took a field trip down to the tide pools in Palos Verdes. I spent the day picking my way through the kelp-coated rocks, amazed by what I was seeing, until one of my school chums said: “Hey Brian, come see this! These kids have found some crabs!”

Excited, I rushed over, hearing raucous laughter, to be confronted by the sound of a crab being crushed against the rock under an older boy’s boot.

The principal characteristic of a stable democracy – often the only thing that prevents it from devolving to fascism – is the existence of a robust and independent justice system. The lack of such a system is what has allowed Putin to make himself the richest man in the world while running Russia. Again and again, his political enemies have languished in jail while the courts transfer their assets to Putin and his cronies.

Watching Trump dismantle our federal justice system is terrifying to me. The onslaught of court cases brought against Trump since the inauguration demonstrate the dangers of letting a narcissistic fraudster into office, and that many of them involve foreign financial dealings means that they are brought in federal court. Trump’s political and financial interests are aligned to the end of destroying the system.

In my mind, that Republican legislators green-light the demolition only builds greater certainty that they’ve got something to hide. Perhaps Republican campaign operatives are linked to the weaponization of the data stolen from the DNC by the Russians?

I was back in Palos Verdes a few years ago. The abused tide pools now are barren rock.