Prickly Pear Fallout

Any addiction to sadness alludes me now, thankfully. The Northwest feels enmeshed, heartful, saturated. Even in the city, you know your bedroom lies in the lull between two forested hills, cradled by moss & fern.

In this dusty desert expanse, I lie on the bed & the entire universe drops off the edge of this room, like a distant memory of nuclear fallout. Survival, extremes, emptiness. Ghost towns of gas-masked experimenters. Sun-leathered beatniks with dirty feet. 40 days, 40 nights.

Yet the prickly pear gives fruit, magenta nectar fluorescent in the sunlight, brighter than any heartblood. And we drink it, a child's treasure, a promise of the rough diamond's rainbow. It is not a plump fruit, but a clarified splash. Might it touch these thirsty veins? A sweet kiss on my pulse? Maybe. But desert nectar distills our better parts from the less desirable so that we might observe from a distance. Not a cradling, but still a gift.

Ladybugs and Laptops

Subtle delight in this scene of the play. On-stage. Off-stage. Curtain closes on the silent fields of mud paths walked by meditators & plantains traversed by ladybugs; the dear, the fawn, the lavender sky lingering above fir trees as the Dhamma hall rises from the tall grass. The unceasing stage of the body plays out the hours, breath by breath, thought by sensation.

Curtain opens. And now, light streams into the shadows of this Portland coffeeshop. The walls: burnt sienna & mustard. A vintage easychair. Paintings of the Oregon coast. Props of a familiar set. Quiet tapping of laptops... Music for the first time in days. The steaming hiss of the esspresso machine, this whirling hush of passing cars. And yet, the sound of my body hums through it all with the subtle, passing sensation of being awakened and soft like a baby bird.

The Silent Body Awakens

10 Days of Noble Silence: complete silence of speech, of body, of place. Here are the first written words... The floodgates change like everything else. Perhaps wordless communication would be most lovely. The first handshake. The first embrace. The first eye contact. The piercing exactitude of living life without affirmation, knowing the only condemnation arises within. Feeling your mind's conversation with apparent reality manifest in the body's sensations.

A tingle in the pinky, a heaviness on the brow, a thick soup slurping across and through the limitless terrain of Body. Earthen weight sliding along sternocleidomastoid. The right hip is blank. Ah. There's the subtle blanket of cloth touching skin, the breath of cold on my forearm. My? Wait. Whose is this anyway? Then smashing into the laminal groove, a stabbing pain takes hold of my shoulder blade, right behind the pericardium, or what the Chinese call the "Heart Protector." My awareness searches for the epicenter of this heartquake, pulsing alongside the primal history of what we call "spine." Indeed, pain becomes broken into the unnamable. The magician's trick of pulse, heat, density shifts beneath my gaze & I can't pin the center. Why suffer my mind to something so ephemeral?

I move on, charting the chop of pulsing density into lighter waters. The tides of mind meet matter on a sparkly shore. And where is the Sun? Hanging fixed in the sky like the one in a child's drawing? Not to be found. I don't find the Earthbody's star, just the drownings of a spiral galaxy. Is it night or day? Rising heat makes wavelets of the atmosphere & then I realize it's moonlight on the water. I glance over as a bird takes flight from a treetop into morning sky. And then submerged again, nearing the ocean's floor, tremendous weight closing; but I can feel the subtle thinness of my skin, the flutter of bubbles float from my lips. So even as my flesh presses closer to bone, I know liquid light casts dusty rays near the surface. Not a smile, not a tear, yet I am bouyant. I could love from this place.