3.

Walking
               jogging
                              floating....I learned the secret of invisibility from an old mage. "So disappear," a homeless man whined.

Working out in the open, as Odysseus did, was a different experience in the Bronze Age. The modern must somehow imagine a world before the combustion engine, before electricity, before skies were filled with a constant whine, the land enveloped with a constant roar, houses with loud noises or music emanating from boxes.

A woman talking to her cell phone: "Where are you?," while gesticulating with a free arm. Her dog barks. I wonder if hares use loops, backtracks, checks, and a clever trail to try to outwit the pack. Smart use of water obstacles, heavy shrubbery, unexpected changes of direction, etc., will make it very unlikely that dogs see us for the ghosts that we are.

A new ghost in this morning's dream
Beautiful and young and still alive
How far will that one follow me? I'm not chasing any,
Any more.

This morning I still feel the dream's presence. Look in a mirror, no images appear. "The ghost of the land looks just like its body." Then I think, "Who sees the dream when the dream itself is me?"

What begins when religion evolves into symmetry? What flows when visions become dry ink? From behind the scrim egos pop out like pustules. One gets the ambiance of spirituality: incense, bells, singing, chanting, kneeling, bowing, praying, preaching, confessing the hunter knows that the animal doesn't hear him when it is dead; and even while it is being hunted there is no question of dialogue between hunter and hunted. Nevertheless the self-deception of talking with the animal exerts a grip, proven by the hunter's repentant words, while what is occurring is the reinforcement of systemized belief.

I read of someone lost among the arid mesas of New Mexico, and I remember not being lost, but the borrowed VW bus breaking down on a hot & dusty back road north of San Francisco. After a short wait, a man appeared and asked what was wrong. I told him that the primitive man who availed himself of dolls and drawings in order to bewitch was generally quite indifferent to the lifelike character of his magical instruments.The typical volt gives only a crude outline of the human body, and, what is most remarkable, the engine had suddenly stopped. "It sounds like the points need cleaning," he said, got a piece of emory board from his pickup truck, snapped open the VW's distributor cap, gently filed the points, and the engine jumped back to life.

I fix truck and lock eyebrows
With tough-handed men of the past.

The fall between forest's chaos and city's order, between unplanned spaces and the developer's scheme. As one walks the path and sees how everything grows as it would, the concept of "God's plan" becomes naive. One sees a process of sorting out—competition, Social Darwinism, Capitalism, don't apply here—between and within species. But there is no order imposed from outside. What is is. Fundamentalism is a misreading of the Void.

On the neurotic loop one always faces forward, never to the center. Stuck, then, the rollercoaster is the best litmus test for this challenge since it represents all of America's jittery ambitions, love of sensationalism and eroticized violence on the top of the loop, like stranded on the top of a Ferris Wheel, the neurosis knots. Neurogastroenterology: the loop, the knot, the pattern, a carnival of dysfunctional rides.

Entering Oregon the first time, late May, drafted a flatbed truck piled with logs eight miles downhill through intermittent rain, cooling after California, to the outskirts of Eugene. I had moved here for the land jolting around curves, cinched up on a gray and deserted day; here, too, an area separated from the rest of the world; and here too, the protected/protracted/procured space in which a lonely body is breathing and moving about, letting the thoughts it harbors sift, shift, and stray through a road too narrow to pass: that wavering truck.

How many tons of toxins are released into the atmosphere in ratio to a child's breath, or trees felled, or poisons poured into the sea? Damned by our fecundity—

Then your waiting is over: something gray stands by your side, that which in the end is you.

A centipede looks both ways before crossing the road. Infinity doesn't make sense to the bridled brain; it's the same with origination. Faint light bends through lenses. Background radiation, allegedly from the Big Bang, adds to the equation. Reading illegible notes, what could I have been thinking?

The art of topiary treats bushes like pedigree dogs bred for showing their oddball shapes. While rocks, carried and pushed around, hold stubbornly to their lineage. Crossing a street, my old heart races against new models of powerful machines, and the urgency of their drivers to clip a few minutes off life's eternal trip.

Lunch's fortune cookie: "Noticing nuances makes decisions easier."

So many bodies have been skewed on God's spit. I can still hear the screams of Giordano Bruno as fire orbited his flesh. Where did he go wrong? Sacredness of Earth, Cosmos, all beings everywhere; instead, throughout the ages the transition from one zone to another, be it physical or psychic, has often been realised via a transitory passage—the portal. This hole, perforation, or gateway demarcating two adjacent or concomitant worlds, commonly the terrestrial or celestial, has possessed various transformative and transcendental powers. Commonly linked to different spatial and conscious states through various mythologies, we got theocracy, hypocrisy, egocentric babbling. I hold a low opinion of people in high office.

Soen Nakagawa "slipped from a precipice and suffered a blow to the head. Lying unconscious for three days until he was discovered, Soen Roshi awoke, but as his friend Yamada put it, 'he was never the same.'" It's to teachers like the late Soen Nakagawa, who slipped from a precipice and was "never the same," that I look for balance.

Winter sea
the arcing horizon
tips over

Satisfaction with the pulse of my life slips away, as if in a clearing the muse I've been waiting for suddenly appeared. The big questions still walkabout on sere trackless land, taking their bearings mythologically, they know where the gods are buried.

My orientation is to bodies whose bones are incised with the alchemical picture of the psychology of Luna, in which salt plays a central role. For Luna. as the feminine aspect of the arcane substance, maintains a close relation to her prima materia, the sea, than does Luna, the mother of all things, who murders the sun in her moisture, possesses also the healing elixir of life, the wisdom of symbols that can't be broken. However, it's not the bones that count, but re-membering the marrow of this all-at-once life.

To approach maturity, some childhood needs are outgrown, others, whose range is diverse, are grown from. The former is a springboard: mundanity is used for impetus to enter a larger world. The latter is foundational: the culture of one's childhood acts as fodder from which an expanded world-view naturally grows.

Hazy morning. From below the veranda of the Japanese Garden, voices rise as if from Hell. Ah, it's the tennis courts! I can hear the balls bouncing off tightly-strung rackets. Looking further, the wild state is clearly a part of a poetic and mysterious universe. Our attempts to understand it on the aesthetic level alone is doomed to failure. My (Aborigine) friends tell me that their survival rests not only on fragile food reserves, but on their ability to enter into the Dreaming whenever the mountain, crowned with snow even in mid-summer, is hidden from view. Closer, a stone lantern scowls as a young couple saunters past it without looking, fully engaged in the presence of each other.

In the Rock Garden,
                 the rocks
  make waves.

Dream: His eyes looked like flat turquoise buttons engraved with runes. Suddenly he was on top of me, pinning me down, his face close to mine, saying "I collect eyes, and I want yours!" A few days later, reading Hayao Kawai, the significance of this dream began to focus. Kawai is speaking about a dream the Buddhist priest Myôe (1173-1232) had in which "he sees the famous priest, Kûkai, sleeping. Kûkai's two eyes looked like crystals, and they were lying beside the pillow. Kûkai gives them to Myôe, who places them in the sleeve of his robe." Kawai comments: "Here I need only point out that Myôe inherited, so to say, the eyes of his prominent predecessor, the tools by which one can see the world."

I thought about how I have always refused to "give my eyes" to an academic setting. As a child I dreaded classrooms, formal settings of any kind. Thus, "Give me your eyes," as we all need to see the body is constructed, dismembered, or repaired in ritual (indeed, the bodily changes of the life cycle-the moments of birth, growth, death, pollution, and purification-are often the key moments of communal symbolic action and reflection). The senses are reoriented and the bodily perceptions are corrected or rearranged through ritual contact with the sacred beings who appear through more eyes than our own, is about the work that I try to do.

"Remember when the Goddess was born - the spider gave her protection."

Walking the trail on either side a wall of vegetation, the creek struggling to breathe temporal bubbles behind summer's new standing. "If we lose this year- round flow, it's another sign we'll someday lose it all."

What does it mean to lose it all? Moss sheds from rocks, brown                                      & bone-                                            dry. Laboring in the center of an ancient pattern, a fly's leg lifts & falls.

Adolescence is a kind of purgatory, a transitory stage, as crossing into adulthood means we clearly inhabit material landscapes that (excepting rare instances) we had little say in construction. These landscapes have walls, doors, windows, spaces of flow (roads, paths, bridges, etc.) that we have to negotiate in order that the soldier who returns home from war who is not psychologically wounded remains an life-long adolescent.

Walking my way
through the city,
I slip & take root.

Waiting for the elevator that takes me to ground level, I look north toward the mountain that blew its top, and think of Tilopa, the Indian saint who lived with beggars under a bridge. Seeing the mountain hidden behind a scrim of clouds, I note that hiding can be a form of false humility. Thus, the man had been buried in a grave hollowed out among the rocks and covered over with earth from the living floor of the cave. Detailed and precise pollen analysis of the grave soil and surrounding levels showed that the body had been laid to rest in a bed of brightly-coloured flowers, probably woven into wreaths with a "hidden Master," willing to teach only those who arduously seek him out, may be hiding from himself.

"A monk was dispatched to a city carrying with him medicine for an ailing saint..." He made the long journey out of the north African desert, reaching the unfamiliar streets of the city late at night. Lost, he came across a sick beggar lying in the gutter. Without thinking, he applied the medicine to the beggar, who soon showed signs of recovery. Having nothing to deliver to the saint, the monk walked back to his monastery, fearing what the abbot would say."

The Lamed-Vaw Tzadikim, the Thirty-Six Righteous, if they meet, don't recognize each other. Sent to Earth to perform one good deed, the true artists of Eden have always built into it a sort of shiver, the possibility of a cloud passing over the sun and transforming the glowing landscape into one sacrificial act for humankind—after accomplishing his task, the Righteous One disappears. Then another, unknowingly, takes his place. To disappear after an act of heroism is the heroic act. No medals, no promotion, no reward. Gone! Who was that masked man who wore no mask?

We talk of an inside as if there is such a place separate from all else. Instead, let's discuss osmosis, the moment of transgression.

The sense of a transcendental God, a stand-in for what is beyond the range of the brain, what we take on faith, doesn't have to be based in a human being. Anthropologists have found burials at least 100,000 years old. That may mean that the people we call Neanderthals, who are not classified as homo sapiens, had a sense of the mystery of death. All spirituality, human or not, turns on this conundrum.

In the middle of the trail, a slug is morphing into what we never see.

Already, at the first glance, before it stretches away, it stretches away, seeking more of itself,
it has become heterogenous, ambiguous, pluralized. Its inhabitants no longer appear
to have an irrefutable or essential relation to any particular space, rather,
space opens up as more than itself, impatient of any horizon.