You know that point in life when you start to get less obsessed with your accomplishments and more interested in the visual effects of the world abounding? I’m in that place. I’m in excavation at the moment. I have busted through some icebergian frosting that had its iron fist around my walled up heart. Fear. Panic. Anxiety. Like being watched from some small camera eyes in the boughs of the trees above. That’s what it felt like. Instead of turn to compost I took that blackened swathed body in a Range Rover with extraordinary friend and sister, Libby Weintraub, to an area in the woods of Long Island called East Hampton. It was there that I saw ancient stars dialing across an ancient sky and remembered what it was like to be still. I remembered what it was like to watch, and receive, and to come through the membrane to the other side. I saw that I was crusted with something I did not need anymore, and that I was pink and white and new again. I’ve had this experience before; the crumbling, the pink mollusc-like being that emerges so vulnerably after. I write about it in my book in fact, you might remember that.
It’s like limestone, a gray dried mud of a plaster casing, with bits of root and dry tendrils too. Gross, huh. And yet people LIVE in it. I was living in it. Notice how I have not been writing. Notice how I have not been really being. There has been a lot of distraction, as if I’ve been looking oblong, sidelong, walking with my head turned away. Weird. It was by being around somebody else who was cracked open, someone such as Libby, which catalyzed the rapidity of my re-emergence. I’ve found myself back in that dimension where time slows down – it sped up during my distraction. My extraction from It all – and am in the glorious joyousness of being conscious again. I woke up! And this is an awesome level, this one. The dimension is wacky – kind of odd. Fireworks go off in my vicinity; I see things like tiny men as high as my knees waiting to be let into apartments, and only later begin to wonder how he might have reached the buzzer? I see strange new buildings, as if the future just opened rapidly, and everything is un-usual. Suddenly the world begins to reveal itself to me, and I am back in business!! My witch-hood hath returned! The Future Has Arrived!!
I hear right now a buzz saw, and think of smelling wood. I hear a thunder rumbling, and a symphony of rain drips off of tree leaves. I see the computer kind of hovering, the thirst in my throat, the great trying of my brain, like a young person, attempting to figure something out, to work at the seams, to push open the door, to frown into the wood puzzle, to see how to explain this. This! This thing we are all in. We capture it with our film making, with our acting, with this writing, with the guttural push of our languages, with saxophonic phonics, with dancing and cakes and coloured salads. We try to capture something in our actions, with our actions. We all try to be still, and listen, head tilted, towards the issuance of this world. We are so at its whim. We are so at its mercy. We are so fearful, and conquering, and timid, and strong – and yet when it rains everyone flees running. When a bolt of lightning magnetizes to the earth and whips down between our cement towers, like so many sandcastles, we crunch inside and the heart races and the hair whips and where do we go? The dog bolts and the eyes move quickly. Quick, quick! Nature is upon us!
I see the building across the street as I unlock my bike at night, and it is covered with a rooftop of golden christmas lights and flaming torches, a large TV screen at one end, all open to the sky. What is going on? Jon, I say, did I tell you how this building used to be a multi-level night club, and Michael Jackson once performed there? Who ever told me that? Wait, what voice in my ear? It might have been…no, that wasn’t it. Was it a dream?
If I have so many dreams in one night and yet can’t remember any of them, could it be that seeds are being planted in my brain which will only sprout later with the right water or fertilizer? Could it be that extraction is really possible – as per Inception, a film which appeared to me as a projection of my own mind within a cinema of reality, within the cinema of life? Could it be that the spirit is truly osmotic? What is the spirit anyway? Couldn’t there be a better word for it? I feel that to put a word on it contains it, and it is formless, definition resistant. And yet. And yet! I can feel it. I can put my hands to it and touch it, but they are the hands of another dimension, another part of my mind. It’s like my mind can explore its qualities not its quantity, via some narrowly tilted corridor of the brain, within which, once I tap into, am able to siphon back into reality. I will not give up this explanation! No, I will not be defeated! For some reason I sense now it dissipating, slipping away (it can be both slippery and sticky, depending on the mind-state), and I am back to this room, this century, this wireless keyboard and those rocks that I brought back from the beach in the Hamptons. These lungs breath this air and gusty wind comes in through the window and I remember my name and what I’m wearing and that a bunch of numbers keep time.
I think about what that buzz saw was sawing (and remember Grace Zabriskie.) I think about my imminent transition to Los Angeles, and the spaciousness I will be creating for myself. “I miss driving.” Good! Go to L.A. I miss being for hours in my house writing, needing only to focus, and travel, perhaps bake, and walk and think. I think of my friends in California. I think of Henry Miller. I think of the light, and David Lynch, and magnolias, and efflorescent pink flowers on vines. I think of the bullshit, and the clamouring bodies, and the smooth stone I squat on back in Santa Monica which had IMAGINE carved upon it, beneath which I plucked my first four leaf clover. I miss the rusty fish shack on the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu, and the bare foot feeling of boardwalks, that pin-ball magic ferris wheel turning perpetually upon ocean waves at the pier. I remember Grace’s Werner Herzog poems, and the tan cream leather of my boyfriend’s car interior.
I will be there soon, sooner than I think, for perhaps I am the master of my domain; perhaps I have clay on my hands more often than I think. Perhaps I have just found what I have been looking for and am in the entity of good, and bliss, and purity – sensing independence as grace, with power. I feel I am averse to any labeling, like water is to oil, averse to any title or task, or effigy of “job description.” I have burnt the identifications that were suffocating, have removed the white towel from my throat. I don’t care how or what people will think about me anymore: “They will think terrible things anyhow!” I only care about what I stand for. What do I stand for? I stand for expansion. I stand for breaking the nuts and bolts off of the identities we build and for sharing your truest self – who wants so badly to contribute – to you, to your whole world, to every single person you make contact with under street lamps and sidewalks and beaten down forest trails. I stand for no fear. I stand for balance, and compassion. I believe in love as a fiercely transformative white fire whose intent and intensity brings about a reflection in your outer world and so touches everything you touch with it. What do you want? Touch it with love and without ego. Mollify it. Especially your suffering. Then let go and go.
Section of 'Astral Body Asleep': the visionary art of Mati Klarwein, 1968
As Ram Dass heard after asking his guru Maharaji, “Maharaji, how do I get enlightened?” Ram Dass waited. Maharaji said just two things: “Serve people. And feed people.” The Harvard Professor that was formerly Richard Alpert the American, was stunned that he had come all the way to India and that it could be so very simple. Simplicity is what I stand for. Being here, really being here, is what I stand for. Why fight it? Why deny it? You’re here? Hello! Hi! We’re in this together. Isn’t it weird? Isn’t it sticky and wacky and slippery and tissue thin vapoury? Isn’t it fun? Can’t it be FUN? Do you feel sad? I feel sad too. Are you angry? I am angry too. Are you alone? I am, too. But I found this thing called communication, and language, and touch-typing, and internet, and trust-worthy people who make me feel good, and places in life that make sense to me. Go there. Go on. Go in! Break down and break through – it’s like an ocean juice, the sluice of salt water embraces you. It is the place we came from. The light and the dark, the saline tears, the space within and between our bodies. Can’t you see that we aren’t separate anymore? I feel that we like the light because we are light. We like the darkness because we came from and through it. You are coming through it. I will go back into it. Meanwhile, we have this. I am happy. Hunger beckons. Peace.
GREEN GLIMMERY
There is a light in everything
a watch swing
a clock thing
there is some time for
everything
the rocklings
the bent wings
there lies a smile on everyone
the glimmering
the sacred thing
eternity is everywhere
in now and now
manifesting.