projects

The cingulate gyrus connects the limbic system to the cerebral cortex; a little like our animal selves speaking to our super egos. Still mysterious to us. The pictures we store, the flashes of insight and technicolor faces…how do we determine which shine the loudest? Of all that thrusts itself into our line of sight, which invites us around the block and onto a strange porch? A porch that may one day become familiar: lucky short term memories become long-term movies. What’s inside that house? For now, just a dream. We are intellectual animals and all that lies in between. The tiny, almond-shaped amygdala can bring back a whole summer with the smell of candles melting on a birthday cake under honeysuckle. When the bees flinging themselves at white and yellow petals buzz into that summer’s best song, you are lost in time. And who are you if you don’t know what time it is?

“Wormholes,” coughed a surfer this morning, as we stared out at the waves, too choppy to ride. “I don’t know,” he wheezed. He’s the only surfer I know who smokes Marlboros instead of weed. “If the past is a memory and the future is fear and hope, they meet here. Now. Which is then…nothing.”

“Which is then everything,” corrected the yoga instructor to my left. She is a yoga instructor, after all. Very into Being In The Moment. We’d just been lamenting the co-opting of our disciplines by shallow douchebags. Her point being that yoga was once a spiritual practice that has been shopped for and bought by people more about tight latex leggings and tight latex buns than compassion or mindfulness, though they love, love, love to use the words compassion and mindfulness. “They co-opted those, too,” she sighed. “Now they’re worse than meaningless.” I told her that music is in a similar place, but if you know me at all, you’ve already heard me rant about this, so I won’t say any more than: shallow douchebags.

“Small world, big picture,” murmured the surfer. Not much left to say after someone says it all.

So what about the memory movies that are overlaid? This beach, dizzy with a thousand home movies, all three of us watching sand stretch the concept of a brain sitting inside a skull. No story is about you. Your own stories are a colorwash, an honor of participants, flying in the face of personhood. Get invisible. There is no self, only an observing will. Must be why we bristle at the idea of a consumer culture. We know it doesn’t suit us, doesn’t work, an ill-fitting latex garment, squeezing the breath out of us. Yoga was breath and now it’s shoppers. Music was breath and now it’s fashion. Nah…not gonna fit. Times will change, depth will return in the boredom and frantic of groping for the next big thing. The shallow douchebags will wander off and leave us to get work done in peace.

If we have to measure ourselves, we measure what energy we have to give. The idea of measuring what we get doesn’t suit, doesn’t work, doesn’t fit, can’t breathe. We don’t disappear when we give up our selves, we finally happen.

When you watch the summer’s best song bees bang against their honeysuckle, you aren’t in your story, the melting wax is. And the buzz. The crazy sugar water between those petals is in the bees’ dream. But the sound of a loved voice is in yours, calling for your attention. And when you turn a corner onto a new block and climb the steps to that strange porch, well, you are the watcher that wilts or lifts according to the timbre of that voice.

Is there pain? Can I help?

Are we laughing now?

When the sand plays my home movies over the waves, I’m the projector. I only appear to help someone else colorwash their sand: a walk-on and then a walk-off in someone else’s dream, while peering around another corner in mine. Yesterday, I stepped onto that strange porch, pushed open its screen door, finally inside that house, now no longer a dream but an afternoon. Long-term movies grope backward and forward through time, clean of hope and fear.

What time is it? I have no idea.

The more time we spend in reflection, the more we refine our sensibilities. Reflect on friendship and you keep those with tangible bonds, let wispier ones drift away. Reflect on your children and control begins to slip as you watch. Reflect on money and you let go that flimsy definition of worth. Reflect on importance and you begin to develop this impression of…special. A kind of exquisite goofiness: laughing and crying at the same time. Reflect on music and you demand resonance or silence.

Reflect on beauty and pretty will never hold you in its grip, nor will ugly repel you. In fact, both concepts disappear. Reflect on cars and you drive less. Reflect on time and being becomes opportunity – bumps, bruises and broken bones included – without the grasping panic of lack. Your ego is an ass because everybody’s ego is an ass and that’s…well, it’s hard. And embarrassing. But in our real hearts, I know we’re quiet Robin Hoods, noisy Buddhas, driven Florence Nightingales, wandering Johnny Appleseeds. Earthbound, valuable and offering.

“If you keep doing yard work naked, the neighbors’re never gonna introduce themselves.” My littlest boy smirked at me as I held a garden hose in one hand and a fistful of leaves in the other.

“I dunno,” I answered. “Depends who the neighbors are.”

Bo sighed. “I don’t think we’re gonna find out.”

It was New Orleans. It was hot. I added a bathing suit and he decided that that was as much as he could expect from a hippie chick raised by another hippie chick.

I lived in a bathing suit throughout the New England summer, too, on the island where I grew up. You can pretty much walk around in your underwear there, as long as you wear flip-flops, like you can in most beach towns, so my son’s modesty wasn’t offended. November beaches are chilly, though. Breezy has become windy, hazy sunshine comes clear and cutting. Bo’s winter wetsuit has long sleeves and booties, but surfing makes him touch his cold cheeks gingerly and call them “meat…human meat.” I stand on the sand, watching him ride green, foamy waves and jam my hands into the pockets of my sweatshirt, listen to the seagulls.

Some seagulls sound like an amp left on all night: burned out tubes, warm and fuzzy but kinda damaged. And some sound like bells: thin, no texture. All seagulls have blank, shiny eyes, so it’s hard to tell what makes them screech in such different ways. Time? I measure that by seasons and by four boys blowing out birthday candles. They get one wish a year…doesn’t seem like enough, but I guess it makes them choose their dreams carefully. Wishes are so revealing, so naked, we aren’t even allowed to share them or they won’t come true. Apparently.

My wishes are seeming a little fuzzy lately, burned out like a damaged seagull. I’m sure the boys’ wishes are clear as bells: too hopeful for texture. Good for them. Hope is good, boys. Hope is very, very good.

Happy birthday, Bo.

Summer in a beach town is sacred meets sordid, like God going to Burger King. Or the other way around, I guess, Burger King coming to God. It’s weird. Also? I can’t stop running. I mean, I can and do, but I don’t want to. I’ve noticed that I don’t have to stop to smell the roses; roseness is everywhere. Inertia hits me in a fast place. Someone once told me that we don’t like to start crying because we’re afraid we’ll never stop. I don’t think I’d ever stop running unless the trail ended.

Plus, I run in heaven. A heaven. On the ocean, with deer and rabbits and mink and goldfinches. The roseness in this place is beach roses – rosehips – and rosehips are so wonderful, they may be the only thing that really matters. Thorny and fragrant, with papery petals, rosier than roses, and tiny, sour fruit, redder than redness.

Anyway, this morning, a shrew ran across my path, so I stopped running and suddenly I knew what hell was. Right there in a heaven, when I certainly wasn’t looking for hell, thought I’d been there, knew to avoid it. But I’d only ever been to pain: a raging restlessness, a hole in your humanity.

Hell is a question, I think. That’s what the little shrew whispered. But first, it’s a pit we stumble into, full of prizes. I won’t start listing shallow rewards; that’s been done before and it’s preachy. I’ll just say that ego’s Vegas is 2-D. Can spread all over your life, take you to your death bed, but it’s still: flat. Like eating someone else’s birthday cake, you could call it “selfish,” but really, it’s just dumb. Gross. Boring. Lonely cuz it’s a perversion of love, and it makes you sick.

Hell’s question is this: how do you breathe/love/live? Weak and shallow or with strength and depth? Sounds simple. Don’t answer yet. Heaven is not your reward for climbing out of hell. There is no reward for climbing out of hell. There might not even be a heaven; just some real nice places we like. We can’t judge all the people down there in the pit, either, as they seem so suited to it. I do kinda wanna shout down into it, I guess: “You’re life’s up here! And you’re missing it!”

But nobody’s gonna cheer if you claw your way through ego’s Vegas and end up right where you started. All the cheering is down there in the pit. That’s where the prizes are, and it’s noisy there.

All that’s up here is two fists of rosehips, red eyes from crying and another birthday cake. But this cake has your name on it and you get one piece. All the other pieces go to the people who love you. And they love you so much.

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Listen to Red Eyes:

“It’s been unfolding for so long, it’s inside-out.”

“What…life? This story?”

“Probly, but I meant that flower. The rose. Don’t touch it, they really do have thorns. Pointy ones.”

“It’s all brown and dead.”

“Not if you look closely. The petals are on-fire pink in the center and the stem is battleship.”

“Battleships and thorns and pointy.”

“And unfolding.”