Chaos

There is a moment in my life every day

when the conflict of a world I do not understand melts away.

I walk down the weathered planks of the docks

past boats larger and smaller than mine,

boats loved, and boats lost and forgotten,

they are still and sleeping

amid the lights reflecting on the river.

Ave waits for me at the end of the row,

strong and silent between the current and the dock,

tugging at her reins one night,

napping in a moonbeam the next,

no need to prove herself to me,

like the unstated calm of a grandparent’s love.

We don’t use words often while at rest, Ave and I.

I check her lines, smiling—

how well she has kept herself while I was gone!

A hand on the boom gallows and I pull myself aboard,

a click of the combination lock and the hatch swings open.

I climb below into a place of perspective, of logic,

of purpose and engagement and discomfort and joy

that is so easy for me to understand,

a stage where I need play no role at all.

Her walls, so narrow to most, hug me close with the warmth

of wood that has seen worlds I cannot even imagine.

Her floors creak underfoot and cry squeaks of delight to my ears,

happy that I am home to be alive on them.

Her motion in the water rocks me to sleep at night

and gently jostles me awake in the morning.

I know it will not always be like this,

will not always be like these nights so special,

but for now I pump water by hand

from the pump I rebuilt myself,

put the kettle on the stove for tea

and light her oil lamp

which sings soft songs of light against the walls.

At utter peace I sit, watching, listening,
the steam from my tea plays games in the air,

and no longer do I remember why it was

that the outside world was in chaos

or why I felt burdened to notice.

Rolling Stone, in a Court of Public Opinion

Rolling Stone's August 1st cover with a photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev seeminly refuses to give up its seat on the bus of public discussion, and I find this discussion fascinating.

This is complicated in part because of those judged lines of journalistic capability (or perceived capability) or lack (or perceived lack) thereof. Rolling Stone has long wanted to be relevant in a scene set larger than a stage of music, and has accomplished this to wildly-varying degrees of success. Does that impact our assessment of their intent? And if so in what direction: positively, for a perceived improvement of their abilities and (therefore-) product, or negatively, for being presumably desperate and/or sensationalistic?

On how many layers is this discussion occupying space in our national dialogue?

For example, what if Dzhokhar "Jahar" Tsarnaev was black?

Well, that hardly seems glamorizing of OJ, does it? Because let's face it--he's not young and pretty. So is the impact of your journalistic intent judged solely on the looks and age of the subject?

And what if Jahar looked more like the crazed madman that he seems to have become? The famously-controversial 1970 Rolling Stone cover featuring Charles Manson hardly seems to be glamorizing a man who, with a combination of powerful allure and sexual manipulation, managed to draw dozens to follow him into a bloody murdering spree perceivably as hideous as--if not more hideous than--the Tsarnaev brothers' cold-blooded Boston bombing.

Well sure--because Charles Manson looks like Charles Manson, damn it, a crazy mass-murdering cult leader. But what if on this cover, exactly this cover, he, in the exact same pose, was, simply put, good looking? What if what we saw here was not the distant gaze of a homicidal madman but the dreamy, far away gaze of a good looking kid? What role does the processing of that have to play in the impact and decisions behind such a cover?

How much does the specific paper represent in the discussion--Rolling Stone vs Washington Post vs Time vs what if it been the cover of People? Life? Playboy?

Although putting this particular picture of Tsarnaev on the cover obviously opens the door to criticism based on an argument of glamorization, it also gets to what is for me the heart of it: this kid could be anyone. You don't have to look like a crazy turban-wearing jihadist to wield the power of hate. That he is a good looking kid pushes the discussion in a direction that we cannot go without experiencing discomfort: Kid Next Door, your daughter's prom date, fell victim to that voice of darkness, now you get to choose if you take that kindling and build a fire of constant suspicion and blind hate or if you fuel a fire of societal introspection. Why did he fall victim? What roles do we all play in that? What lessons can realistically be learned?

If putting an attractive photo of him on the cover is bad because it glamorizes hate and violence, could we instead post photos of him bloodied, laser-targeted, and submissive? That way we would only be glamorizing... violence and vengeance. Whoops. I meant to say "justice."

I think that people who scream that the RS cover is glamorizing Jahar are themselves discomforted that they find him attractive and are incapable of channeling that into an internal dialogue about that dichotomy. How could he be both attractive and a ruthless killer? And the fact that these people may be incapable of initiating that conversation within themselves does not render the exercise moot; it is an off-putting, awkward, necessary path for the national conversation to follow if we desire a realistic engagement on the issue of domestic terrorism.

That this young man wasn't born a terrorist but became one while living here strikes at the heart of the discussion that needs to be happening. We perch ourselves high on a limb of political and ideological purity: we are fighting for right, our violence is perpetuated for right, against a clear evil who has brought meaningless violence against us and murdered our brothers and sisters. They must be stopped and their message must be exposed; words you could attribute to a soldier fighting the War on Terror and yet words one could also imagine coming from one of the Tsarnaev brothers. I am not mocking your position, I am simply making a point of perception.

Therein, to me, lies the dialogue that we cannot start without examining him as a human being, and crossing that line of comfort by plastering his pretty face on the cover of Rolling Stone is a step in that direction.

TIME

by Kunjabihari Adhikari 

~~This piece was written by my cousin Kirin (as I call him) who lives in India~~

Time is like an accordion
You can shove it tight together—compact
Or open it up wide and let it extend itself to wherever it wants to go
Because, the part of me that wants to make it dense does so out of a sense of being—‘the doer’
Thus shoves time into so many different receptacles, parcels, filing cabinets, folders:
The body, family, friends, schooling, home, country, creed, custom, language, culture, means of livelihood, job, religion, hobbies...
Constantly going through this inventory and comparing it with others’ inventories—FACEBOOK
Me—a miniature Mother Earth surrounded by a humongous, heavy, metal, iron junkyard
In the form of satellites revolving around, bouncing signals back and forth
Like a bunch of spherical 3D Facebooks, soft, round balls all warm and fluffy
rolling around, on top of and underneath one another.
If time gets too compact, too dense, it becomes like a SivaLinga, with scratches all over it
From where I have (only) scratched the surface, since the hard stone is too hard to penetrate
Hard, cold, dense objects thinking themselves to be all warm, soft and fluffy
So they can get touchy feely with one another,
merging their edges together
These edges are our own personal junkyards that we carry with us, our periphery, our crust, our peel
Others are surrounded by gossamer filaments full of light and love, pure awareness
Nurturing
Sending the light and love on its way
Not trying to hoard for one’s own, in a possessive sort of way – thus retarding the flow
A conductor, a messenger, facilitator, via medium, nimitta matram bhava savyasachin—
An instrument in the hands of another The only superfluous receptacle / folder
Above and beyond the irremovable ones: food, clothing, shelter...
Of interest and worth its maintenance, is: Lila, Drama, Stories
Translating Vaisnava literature into English
Or, films downloaded from the internet
Or—dramas downloaded through other channels, conduits, threads, filaments
Onto the screen of the mind
This being the only folder of any importance it becomes the proprietor of time
The other receptacles having been minimized to the smallest size possible
So that the glue, the glow that holds everything together is this dramatic unfolding
Invest your time where you get the best returns So the question is: what films do you like? are you attracted to? What books do you like?
What kind of people do you like? horror stories? tragedies? romantics?
Amazement, humour, chivalry, compassion, fury, fear or dread?
Who are you rooting for? Which characters do you relate to?
Sadistic, vengeful maniacs?
Or, innocent, wide-eyed, sweetness, sometimes a little spicy, feisty
In flirting with knowledge
As if one could acquire it, simply by trying to do so—by study, by supplication, by saturation...
If the one and only receptacle has its junkyard smashed and removed, the outer husk torn off
Only the gossamer filaments remain, converging at the assemblage point—individual consciousness
Awareness
These fibres of light remember how to communicate, how to recognize compatible colours,
Sounds, sights and tastes
Before the days of the heavy, crusty junkyards, impeding any real connectivity
To bare one’s soul
Thus, life (the prana) is comfortable when surrounded by vibrations of the same frequency
Natural attraction
The less awareness is processed by so many calculative, contingent factors, all based on personal gain
This intuitive attraction
Symbiotic nurture becomes the norm
Two sources of illumination, illuminating one another
Knowledge expands in the same way that drops of mercury,
fallen on the floor from a broken thermometer
Bond together by their mutual attraction and contiguity
When the ocean is churned so many products come out, poison amongst them
But the taste of the amrit (ambrosia) makes one forget everything else Set it free, let time fly
Out of its containers, less, smaller containers
Break the levees, the boundaries, what separates what is inside from what is outside
Break your own cocoon and fly, like a butterfly

The Throned Men

Who are you,
crazy evil demon genius
alone with your thoughts,
quixotic?

Dare not wander or doubt.
No scripture preached
nor dogma taught
asks this of you
(or permits it).

We alone are the throned men,
we alone rule on free will.

We have written for you a song
to which there are no lyrics,
drawn for you a map without roads,
written for you a book without word,

and the thinking among you shall lay in ruin,
bludgeoned by the scepter of faith.

For we alone are the throned men,
and we alone rule on free will.

Pizza Delivery

Yesterday I hosted a drum circle at my apartment, an opportunity to bask in the abundant good energy of good people. After a typically-late Saturday night at work I crowbarred myself from bed shortly before noon on Sunday in an attempt to make the apartment look habitable.

I was hungry already as I was straightening up, and the thought of hosting 8 or so friends in my sparse surroundings seemed somewhat less than gracious--I own no food other than a box of oatmeal, several bags of dried garbanzo beans and lentils, and perhaps some soy sauce. Maybe. I don't even own paper towels. I seem to live the life of a hermit. Regardless, I wanted my friends to have food available so ordering pizza came to mind, and I called Duccini's.

Thirty-five or so minutes later my phone rang as is the custom of delivery drivers here in the District. "Pizza is here," a simple, older voice said. "Coming," I replied.

I emerged from my wrought iron front-door gate and bounded up the steps towards the street. The pollen was falling like a Rocky Mountain snow storm and spiked, vibrant blue tulips were waving back and forth in my front yard. DC in April.

"Hello," I cried towards the minivan with the glowing delivery cap attached to its roof. An older man, perhaps in his late 60s, most-probably Ethiopian, emerged around the back of the van with a purposeful walk, my two boxes of pizza, and a sly smile. He looked up at me as he drew nearer.

"It is a beautiful day," he sang to me, slowly and sincerely.

"Every day is a beautiful day," I suggested. He stopped walking and just looked deeply into my eyes.

"You, my friend, should write poetry. Do you write poetry?" He glanced down at the flowers.

"I do."

"Ohhh!" he exclaimed. The pizzas came my way. "$18.69." I handed him $23.

"You,"--again that penetrating look through my eyes, maybe analytical, maybe fascinated--"have a beautiful soul."

"We," I corrected him, "have beautiful souls." With this I reached out my hand. My calm, soulful delivery man grasped it, shook it, and then brought it to his face and gently kissed a dry kiss on the back. And then he was gone.

It is there, it is always there, but only if you have your eyes open.

The Battle of the Grey

The dried tendrils of Earl Grey tea were traitorously "plink plinking" into the filter of the small cast-iron Japanese teapot that my youngest daughter had proudly given me for Christmas. She had her first job, hostessing at Applebees, and was eager to prove her membership in the semi-grownup world by finding and purchasing the perfect gift of her own accord and with her own earnings. Built into that small teapot was another message: I get you, and you get me, and this teapot proves it.

On this particular Tuesday I was angry at the tea. The sight of the canister on the pantry shelf brought with it promises of the sort I wanted to hear. The water boiled eagerly in the water kettle and gave off a youthful whistle when it was ready. The tea, however, revealed its true self in the meantime; one can't just scoop loose Earl Grey -- it resists the intrusion of a spoon, stubbornly sitting, refusing to part. Sand you could scoop with a spoon. Sugar you could scoop with a spoon. Flour, popcorn kernels, butter, blueberries -- damned near anything in the world will avail itself to the scoopage of a spoon. But the Earl Grey fights back. You can defeat it -- you can muscle your way through it, but in so doing you employ blunt force and break the promises held in the perfection of the tea, and thereby you also destroy, strand by strand, the peace of mind that lay sifted and ready in the canister to begin with.

Unable to tolerate the idea of punishing the tea I was left grasping for alternative methods. Smallish ice-tongs came to mind, maybe a fork would be less intrusive, less harmful to the tea, like a pitchfork to hay. But no, these, too, seemed wrong. Why was the tea fighting me? Why did I care? It's just tea. Loose, dried plant leaves with neither conscience nor soul. And yet there it lay, like so many things in my life, offering promise and conflict woven together like a warm, itchy woolen blanket.

I decided the only honorable way to encourage the tea out and into the filter of this quiet, confident little teapot was to tilt the canister and help the tea out with a fingertip. That's when the traitorous sounds of cold, dry sleet "plink plinking" on the roof of my car came forth, not sounding like tea at all. I'm not sure what tea leaves are supposed to sound like, but they do not sound like sleet and they do not make me think of car rides through winter storms. My father always drove -- he was an amazingly good driver, knew every trick, every nuance of the car. Owning a car in the 1940s and 1950s was just different, I think, and forced you, the owner, to open a dialog with the car by which you both managed your way, awkwardly at times, through life. Like most relationships, these were fraught with good times and bad, tough lessons learned, and a hard respect forged in the end. Driving through the sleet meant that Dad was in control, he and the car were talking to each other, the world felt even safer than normal, because the one man you knew could tame this was at the helm. Along the way words would come your way, teaching you gently about this relationship. "You always want to gear up early in snow or sleet. Higher gear means less power, less power means you're less inclined to lose traction." You didn't respond to these as they came other than to nod, maybe let a meager "Uh-huh" pass to let him know that you had heard him. Human sponge. Listen to Dad, as Dad had listened to his father before him.

But this was tea, and I didn't want the tea to remind me of sleet or resistance or to bring to the forefront anything that may have been wrong with my life at that moment, on that day. The tea was supposed to hold my hand, stroke my hair, and say "There, there" to me softly while I sit on the couch and stare out the window. And those people walking by, right outside my window, I know they don't have issues with tea, or sleet, or life, or just being happy with the littlest of things. No, those, I just know, are reserved for me. No one else knows that the tea can be traitorous. They walk by my window and here I am, fighting the moral conflict of the ages in plain sight right in front of them, and they don't even know.

Comfort Is My Enemy

Comfort is my enemy,
challenge my fuel,
failure my foundation,
flaws my color.

Knowing is my cancer,
it destroys me, kills me,
and these are my cure,

my joy.

All I Want for Christmas is a Chance

It was four days before Christmas on H Street Northeast in a section of Washington DC that clings to the northern edge of Capitol Hill and is known to locals just as "H Street," nothing more. Tired buildings lean broken and vacant among their rebuilt and freshly-painted peers as revitalization has come to this long-downtrodden part of town, and this economic momentum has brought with it people like me who work in the businesses that now pepper the formerly-quiet neighborhood.

This day a man stood in the bright sunshine on the sidewalk in front of the bar I manage, gesturing somewhat wildly to someone (real or imagined I did not know); this is not in its own right anything of note, as the homeless wander the streets pretty regularly in this city and the regulars on H Street are among the most flamboyant. Wild gesticulations are hardly worth a second glance in a world where folks have conversations with lampposts and shout poetry on the corner to imaginary audiences.

Something about this presumably-homeless man caught my eye, though. Perhaps it was just the way he stood or the expression on his face, but I walked to the window for a closer look. Maybe in his mid-thirties, he was unshaven and clearly drunk as he was having a hard time standing without swaying. His face was intense as an undercurrent of anger seemed to flow through his eyes. His clothes looked old and second hand, but the ill-fitting sport coat over his shirt seemed to suggest he wanted to look cleaned up. And, under each of his tired, dirty arms, was a child.

A boy of maybe 4 and a girl of perhaps 6 or so stood by him, his dirty hands resting on the clean shoulders of their new clothes as they looked into the lens of a camera trying to capture the perfect moment, the pressure of which was obvious on the man's face. Perhaps it was his one chance to offer these kids proof positive for the future that he had been there, if only that day. A memory for a lifetime.

In what feels like an ever-more callous society I would challenge you, you who have never been close enough to touch a child whose normal could be this, a child whose smile could ring so hollow on the heels of Christmas: while you are counting the piles of gifts under your tree, chastising a spouse for forgetting the batteries for that special toy, bagging your mountains of trash and carelessly ripping open your bounty, I challenge you to look in your hearts, and to see our obligation to change the path for children like this and to have compassion for the adults that too many of them become. 

When, in 30 years, these little children become this broken man because we did nothing, I will ask you -- as you scream about their entitlement mentality and their babies on welfare -- I will ask you what you did to help, because I cannot believe that the thinking among us can blame that little boy or that little girl for the future that was lain so crudely at their feet.

A Poem

Arms raised high,
bloodied fingers claw heaven's floor.
Foolish gods laugh and dance, as
cobbled feet drag over stones
and men of faith chase the extraordinary,
each other in tow,
and who is left but the thinking
to clean the blood from the earth.

Blessed

Ere you wish to bestow on us
your songs of thankfulness sworn,
of blessed gifts from heavens on high,
silk, and triumphantly worn,

your shepherds who have had the truth
prescribed by them from above, 
whose thinking lay stashed for another day.
You are blessed, they say, to have love.

You are blessed, they say, with your health and your work,
you are blessed, they preach, with your youth,
yet where is the heart of the fickle above
less concerned with substance than couth?

"Eat now," they sing, "from this body of God,"
"Drink now," they sing, "from chalices gold."
Their words are the cloaks we inherit at birth
and we young learned to hide in their fold.

If blessed then how not cursed are we
when fate -- your model, not mine --
so decides, that blessed is the dog at your feet
thought and soul decaying and dying?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
blessed are the angels on high.
Preachings of blessedness fall on deaf ears,
for blessed, as a concept, is lies.

The Choice of Hapiness

Ideally, happiness -- a state of mind -- a perception, if you will -- must be able to exist regardless of the results of life's excursions. That does not render the excursions themselves pointless; quite to the contrary. Much is to be gained from the journey itself. But if you agree that happiness should exist independently of these journeys, then the logical extension thereof is that it is not that which you seek that brings the happiness but a preexisting choice. A results-based threshold of happiness is doomed.

Suppose for a moment that you were the sole living being on a planet with a limited food supply. You need the food to live, yet you know there is not enough to last you your natural life. To not hunt the food is to die a certain death. To successfully hunt the food brings a sating soon tarnished as the thief time steals from you; thief winning, you die yet.

To not hunt, is to die. To hunt, also, is to die. Choosing to stay at home in the mind means the self will live a happiness that is swaddled in the blind cloth of awareness, as if our lone survivor could manufacture boundless food in his mind.

For betting on a threshold of results, you will surely die.

soul marches on? A Re-post from March 2010

lying in a field of fire
soul above me
stretched thin
battle weary
i am awake
i am asleep
i am all people
marching, righteous.
and the man says
we’re moving
but i don’t know
if he’s talking to me
or to my soul,
and so I march,
and i go
i stay
i fight
i die
and i live
or perhaps it is my soul
that marches
i can no longer tell.

Nowhere Man

I like Facebook. I was in early, and I’m on a good amount, but lately I find myself dreading even logging in. Political rancor, mindless repostings of unverified quotes plastered over the photo of a famous so-and-so, and shared links to things I don’t care a lot about have driven me to risk not finding out about your dog dying/daughter’s graduation/photo of your dinner.

It got me to thinking, and the thinking got me absolutely nowhere, and I love it.

Let’s straighten a few things out:

·      I admire people who have opinions.

·      I enjoy debate that occurs in a positive, constructive manner.

·      This post is not really about Facebook or politics.

·      [spoiler alert:] We are all always nowhere.

I have a friend in LA who is by no means a stupid man who remains 100% convinced that 9/11 was a Bush manipulated plot to start a war, drive up oil prices and make the Bush family billions of dollars in profits. And you know what? I cannot prove him wrong.

Then I had a little epiphany one day, in response to a posting from him, an epiphany that led me to think: What if you are right? Does it impact my day? Or my life? Does it change my opportunities to be a good father to my children or a responsible participant in my society? And now this thought process has come to me again, a tattered and bloodied victim of the thoughts, opinions, and ramblings of a myriad of people who seem to care and who, in their caring, drag us all into a garbage-filled gutter where the broken are left to die.

It goes like this:

            Facebook => Crap Feed => Disgust => Revelation => Freedom

The flow of these random streams of rancor lead me sometimes to insight and sometimes to disgust. So many people, so many opinions, so much energy being put into arguing the rights and wrongs. My brain freefalls – things used to be this way (or that way), it used to be worse (or better), it has never been this bad, the country is falling apart (or maybe no – maybe this is what makes the country great). It’s endless AM radio static in my brain, and it’s horrifying.

Then, I return to my conversation with said 9/11 conspiracy theory friend, and I remember: it doesn’t really have to matter.

He thought that the World Trade Center event was a hoax, and he was angry at me for not believing him. And whether he was right or wrong didn’t matter, because I have chosen to live my life in the now and the now does not require of me to know the answer to his questions. All the now asks of me is compassion and awareness.

I, today, still get worked up over politics. I get worked up over xenophobia, homophobia, and allodoxaphobia. Even over the very concept of “nations.” Sometimes I get scared that we’re messing it all up. Then the revelation hits – again – and the shackles of my fear fall like dirt to the ground.

It just doesn’t have to matter. Today – today alone! – I will be presented with more opportunities to do good and to be good than I am capable of seeing. Stephen Batchelor teaches us a particular Buddhist meditation that I use often: "Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?"

Not very often is my answer: “Worry.” So this debate leaves me exactly, happily nowhere.

T'ai Chi

I spent the day in Annapolis yesterday, with my father and a friend -- my father because I invited him to spend some unstructured down time with me this week, and my friend because he needed an escape from his apartment.

After lunch we sat on a bench by the water and smoked some good cigars, talking about boats and life and watching the world go by. A man, white and maybe in his late-30s, did t'ai chi in the sunlight near the edge of the park, methodically and purposefully. Two younger black boys, one thin and one heavier set, both maybe 13 or 14 or so, were doing skateboard tricks up and down the curbs nearby. Tourists streamed through, as they do, chatting and taking photographs.

Then the most amazing thing happened.

The boys were staring at the man and they started to mock his practice. He saw them, it was clear, but he continued through until he reached a stopping point a good while later. I looked away for a moment to my boats and my cohorts, and when I glanced back I saw him demonstrating a basic move to the thin boy, who was facing him, mirroring what he was doing, trying, clearly, to understand it. Skateboard down, lying on the ground, a relic from a moment just gone by when mocking was king and t'ai chi was freaky. Hands up. Hands down. Up as we fill the lungs. Exhale and dooowwn.

"No, no, no! Like this!" his heavier-set friend said. A second skateboard fell to the curb, and in that moment the three of them were there, strangers so oddly brought together, doing t'ai chi in the sunshine in a park by the water in Annapolis, straight out of nowhere.

How many such moments take place in the world in the course of a day? Am I left to lament the fact that it isn't more or to celebrate that I experienced this one -- perhaps so small and so large all at the same time?

My City. A re-post from July 2012.

It's walking to the bank. It's diversity. It's tamales for breakfast and Jon Wye and protesters by the White House. It's stickers for causes and girls in dresses on bicycles and dog walkers and Marine One. It's Dupont Circle farmers market and lamb from the country and an herb garden in the back yard and friends close by. And at this moment it's my city.