Realist.
Everyone talks about the calm before the storm, so let me tell you about mine.
I’m laughing. Hard, like I’ve just heard the funniest joke to ever be told. I’m giddily joyful to be here, with my good friends, high on the energy I normally run from. Because usually I’m happiest (and safest) in a dark corner away from humanity.
Then it hits me. Every single time this has happened, it’s been followed by some epic betrayal or confusing hurt that has followed me for years. So, yes, it’s only a matter of time.
Why can’t I just be happy? Because the world is cruel. Some people’s happiness depends on the sadness of others... more specifically, the sadness of me. Because I’m one of those people who leaves a trail of enemies.
It doesn’t kill to be happy. But it does kill to forget reality.
We’re not all going to stand in a circle and hold hands. Everyone has their own agenda. Even they themselves might not realize it, but everybody wants something. If they want it enough, they’ll take it from you. Hey, I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.
Remember, you can’t get stabbed in the back if you’re looking behind you. And the only person you can ever completely trust is yourself. I know some may disagree, but even the ones who love you most still don’t have your priorities. As long as you’re still an honest, moraled person, it doesn’t hurt to hold everyone at arm’s length for a while. I’m not saying be cruel. But look out for yourself...survive.
And secrets? Keep them to yourself until you can quadruple swear that this person is the right one to tell. And when you have to ask “how could you be so evil” remember that no one is the villain in their own story.
Plains
Everyone talks about the white light. I'm not sure if that's what they hope they see, or its just become a common thing to say because people open their mouths about their near death experiences and its all they seem to remember. I know I sure as hell didn't see one.
No, I opened my eyes to darkness and shadows, to the feeling that the place I was in, was worse than any Hell I'd ever been warned about. Ever get a foreboding feeling so strong, that it can't be real? That the terror you feel, the urgency and anxiety rearing up within you was just a nightmare? That you wish, that whatever had brought you to that moment, you'd never experienced?
I'd thought I'd known fear until I opened my eyes to the Plains.
The Plains.
Its what those of us stuck here call it. Or what they called it. I haven't been here long enough to really be a citizen. All I know, is you keep moving, and you trust no one. That foreboding feeling, it never goes away. There are things here that prey on us. They hunt us, for what I don't know, I've never seen one. But you can feel them around you, hunting. You know when one of them is near, because you remember your moment of death, that fear, all over again. At least that's what I was told.
She said this place was a second chance, but I don't know what fucked up deity would come up with this place as a shot at redemption. And personally, there are some people here that look like they should've earned a one way ticket upstairs. Most of those guys though, they aren't around anymore. They were taken by the shadows or killed by others that lose their damn minds. The Plains eat at you, the constant fear and worry, it stresses the soul and the pressure breaks the spirits of the kinder few. Personally, I think they were just too weak for this place. I'm not saying I'll survive in the end, but I never pretened I was anything but a monster with blood on her hands.
This place is only for the strong. The ones that feel they have business to attend or something left undone. I'm no ghost haunting some shitty house or tormenting someone that inherited my belonings; I didn't have anything worth owning. I was a killer, born and bred. I was a terror, and I knew there was a seat at Satan's table, waiting for me. (imagine my confusion at realizing this wasn't Hell.
The Plains are where you end up when when Heaven and Hell don't want you. Its where you go when you aren't whole; best guess I have to that, is that reincarnation is partially correct. This place is a punishment and a reward; damnation and redemption. Its for those who have been wronged and done wrong. For those killed too soon in unforgiving ways, and those that brutalized them. Its the final teacher, the last chance for you to change your monstrous ways. Because lets face it, when you're brutally tortured and murdered, you're gonna enter the afterlife with a bit of rage and resentment.
So heed my advice, or don't, (I really don't give a damn), but if you find yourself in the Plains, fucking run. Run in whatever direction you feel is the most accurate. Run before the shadows realize you're here, find your salvation and do everything you can to protect them, because they're your way out.
little bird
I would be the little yellow bird.
The one who moved into the birdhouse this spring.
Because I think she is like me.
She is shy.
A bit of a loner.
She rarely shows herself.
She doesn’t want to impose.
And she just knows.
Instinctively.
Just like she knew her home.
The one I placed 4 years ago.
And no one came.
No one, but she.
Because she knew.
Little bird, you are me.
And I am you.
Scent of the Divine
What can we learn from those deprived of fully or normally functioning senses about accessing other ways of being? How can we avoid the domination of visual processing, the consequent ownership of everything we see, and the blind instinct to pin everything down into permanence in the realities we create in our minds? Everything, and often everyone, we see we want to possess and fossilize, preserving them in aspic, making them permanent. These collections often become our reality and, naturally, we fear their loss.
For urban dwellers in the developed world, the allure of millions of visual signals pulls us out of our true nature. We are provoked by their sight to make choices, to possess or reject. In modern life, the monopolizing visual sense can generate synthetic conditions in which we ‘see,’ but more importantly ‘are seen,’ and we interpret everything to suit us, on our terms. Whereas the non-visual senses - listening/hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling - receive concrete data from the environment, e.g. sound, scents, textures and shape, flavours and temperatures, etc. that need no interpretation as they are un-seeable, invisible to most humans. In a series of articles soon to be made into a book, I will explore these ancient senses that I believe link us with our innate divinity.
Our true nature is both visible and invisible, never limitable to man-made concepts like space and time, to merely seeing and being seen. Our sacred responsibility while inhabiting the visible world is to live out our unconditional love and compassion so we can convey the lessons of humanity to others. As well as to revive our divine energy in these days of shocking social deterioration and urban isolation. In simple terms, our senses are out of balance in modern life, so by closing down the visual sense and ‘going inside,’ we can make contact with our higher self and the vast magical land of the invisible.
The ‘I,’ the ego, and the physical eye operate in a similar way. As mentioned, the visual sense is the most dominant in our consumerist acquisitive societies, manufactured diversity and pluralism overwhelm us with choices, alternatives, get-out clauses, and so on. If we cannot see something, there is a possibility that we consider it not to exist, or at the very least, to have no validity. We need proof either with the naked eye or in writing to make things valid because our trust in others and in our perceptions of reality is so weak.
It is no wonder then that we cling desperately to the ‘self’ as evidence that our flesh and blood actually exist. But in that clinging, there is a possibility that we may have lost all contact with our true self, our true nature; that our divine flame is either guttering or has extinguished altogether.
In respect of the above, the visually impaired are fascinating. If we take away visual data from human existence altogether, then how do we make sense of the world? I have had the privilege of working with visually impaired children and adults as a Music Therapist. They have taught me so much about concrete communication, contributing to my own spiritual insights and helping me to step beyond the straitjacket of duality which most of us wear.
Before writing in detail about my professional experience, I would like to bring attention to a film which movingly depicts how a person deprived of sight as an adult, makes sense of his new world. The title is ‘Scent of a Woman’ 1992, based on an Italian film released in 1974 Profumo di donna, (director Dino Risi, leading role Vittorio Gassman, based on the story Il Buio e il Miele by Giovanni Arpino).
A colonel is injured in an accident, losing his sight entirely. He adapts badly to his disability by drinking heavily and lashing out obnoxiously at everyone around him. Eventually, he sees no reason to go on living so he employs a young student paying his way at a local university to accompany him to New York to take his final pleasures before shooting himself. He packs his pristine gun in his suitcase and practices assembling and cleaning it obsessively before they leave.
Booking into the best hotel, he lavishes them both during their stay. In the hotel, there is a dance floor, a small band playing Latin American music in the afternoon where guests are dancing formally. The colonel senses the fragrance of a woman sitting nearby them and somehow knows that she is alone. He goes to ask her to join them for a drink, and then to his helper’s incredulity, forcefully invites her to dance the tango with him. He knows the steps intimately and the floor clears to watch the spectacle. His helper is nervous at first but soon relaxes as they stride out together confidently, victoriously.
Personally, this scene has incredible nobility because of my experience of visual impairment. Apparently, all the visually impaired colonel needs to achieve the impossible is the fragrance of a woman, his healthy body receptive to vibrations, and his kinesthetic memories of dancing the Tango-all of them concrete data.
Is it possible to reconstruct a visually accessed environment in terms of sound and movement? I know first-hand that this is what the visually impaired do to make sense of their world. A young female client blind from birth had never seen anything or anyone; unusually, she did not experience even faint patterns of light or shadow. She had no choice but to utilize sound and movement as her environment, making mountains out of piano chords and snowy summits with her agile voice. She could create a journey in a ship by jumping high to make wave patterns and the rocking of the vessel, using her fingers and voice as the people on board. She was happiest without words, entirely nourished by the vibrations of sound and its sensation in her body. I often envied her freedom from intellectual assessment or interpretation, craving only spontaneous integration with the stimuli.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, spiritual teacher and visionary, said, “The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you get caught up in the description as most people are, then you will never see the mountain.’ Of course, my young client had never seen a mountain and never would be able to do so, so instead, she could sense it made of sound and smells combined with her own bodily movements in space. This could be said to demonstrate just how attached the sighted become to words and their meaning. Being receptive to only the sound of the word and not its meaning can liberate us, so we are able to revert to our true spirit nature beyond mere symbols. As we listen to music, imbibe the fragrance of toasted bread, taste a freshly picked ripe plum, finger fabric made from silk in the dark, words become redundant and shockingly inadequate except in the hands of a talented poet.
Colonel Slade on the other hand, had seen many mountains and had actually experienced their descriptions but was now dependent on memories of mountains. Would he be content with this vagueness when he had made mountains so permanent in his life? Would his awareness of mountains gradually dissolve if it could not be refreshed? Would his sense of loss, of the living reality that everything is impermanent, finally hit home and bring him to an awakening, or would it be utterly unendurable? Perhaps he was now consumed by the description of himself as a blind helpless and pitiable being and failed to see that he was not the described. It would seem that his decision to kill himself in some way represented the final irreversible permanence.
Although occasionally troubled by the language and words of her carers and therapists, which she was often unable to interpret, my young client was completely happy and reasonably well-adjusted in normal life. But she became aggressive if she was not allowed to move her body through the air or was blocked from feeling the vibrations of sound because this was the only way she could be certain that she existed. So, in terms of her inner spiritual life, she was not beleaguered by dialogue from either her demons or her false angels, not attached to concepts and theories, and not hampered by the acquisitive ‘I’ or ‘eye.’ Whatever she needed to affirm her identity came from sounds and smells, touches and tastes. Words were not symbols which developed an intellectual reality of their own to her and caused her to live in an abstract world of the mind.
The visible. The invisible. A famous blind and deaf phenomenon Helen Keller, who eventually learned to live in the visible and audible world said, ‘the best and the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt in the heart.’ This spiritual view of life comes from a gruelling heart-breaking training as a child to be able to live in the world of the sighted and the hearing. Her complete adaptation is testimony to our ability to overcome anything if the divine flame in the heart is strong and we do not allow our senses to be out of balance.
As the world is designed for the sighted, it is impossible for the majority of the unsighted to make sense of it. They experience existence more directly, more concretely, often from the higher self. This is an inspiration. Many of us have learned to access the higher self through meditation or prayer, which invariably entails closing the eyes and focusing our listening. But how we struggle with distractions in the form of words – notions, speculations, justifications, judgments, criticisms, ad infinitum.
We naturally want to escape from this relentless barrage of concepts, so look for a path leading away, taking us out of ourselves. It is ironic that all we need is already located inside us if only we can quell the noise of our minds and just be in silence and stillness. The blind cannot escape and have no desire to usually. They are content to finger the complex textures of an item on and on or jump continuously to experiment with their balance or to mingle with concrete energies.
In spiritual practice, we aspire to go beyond words and other habitual interpretations of reality. We can learn to sink down into the firm yielding of now and here, of the great still silence where we too, like the unsighted, can detect vibrations and use other tools accessible to humans such as clairvoyance, perfect pitch, telepathy, that we once utilized. Colonel Slade’s tango with a beautiful fragrant woman almost pushed him over the edge, sending him to lock himself into his room and prepare his gun. Then he felt the love of his young accomplice in an angry invective about his cowardliness and self-pity and knew he could play a useful role in his young life. He could settle for concrete stimuli in time and found wisdom behind his irascible intolerance, and he could still believe in questions and their answers, somnambulating around the visual world learned from memory, at least for a while longer.
The questions the congenitally blind may pose are mere sound-play empty of meaning: hearing their own voices, imitating other voices, projecting the sounds their being can create to chart their environment. They are not desperate jabs at understanding existence, of ‘seeing’ through or behind impressions, of ‘understanding’ and interpreting everything as those of the sighted, because they know there are no questions, so there are no answers.
They are not separated away from existence because they cannot see to measure and compare, to judge and sort, to speculate or criticize. We sighted need to accept everything and step beyond duality to reconnect with our divine origins. Whereas the blind are embedded in existence; they cannot easily move around in their concrete environment as we do in the virtual worlds we invent.
It is difficult for those who have always been able to see the world to imagine the world of the congenital blind. They are like ghosts using their body form as an instrument to detect their environment. They themselves become concrete in the same way that what they perceive best is concrete. They do not take what is visible and transient deep inside them and make it invisible in order to learn lessons and connect with the invisible world. They are invisible already.
They are usually calm and steady because everything is already lost in their world; they can hold onto little and describe nothing. Voices come and go and textures and temperatures are continually changing beyond their control. There is no light or shade. There are no models to imitate except vocally which means they are often excellent mimics because of their exclusive audio focus. We often pity them, their deprivation of the treasures of the visual, but their insight into life is extraordinary and their link with the divine I believe functions strongly.
My blind client knew my inner thoughts as I worked with her. She had clairvoyance without doubt, and she could predict my future. As a music therapist, I was one of the few people she wanted to be with all the time because I could make soundscapes for her and with her, and she could use instruments and her voice and body to act in them.
Our environment can provide concrete data such as resonances, smells, textures and temperatures, tastes and kinesthetic awareness, none of which are open to the same kind of interpretation as visual data perceived only by the physical eyes. These data are invisible, the dimension and substance of our spiritual origin.
The shaman in primitive tribes enters into a trance to connect with the world of spirits to access wisdom of the elder ancestors. He or she can no longer ’see’ in the physical sense. Soothsayers and seers have traditionally been visually impaired. We are told by Buddhist Masters that during our time in human life we are living in a dream world in which everything is impermanent and created by our minds.
The blind colonel on the dance floor moving his own body and his unknown partner’s through space to the majestic rhythms of the Tango inspired by the fragrance she is wearing is a moving feat to the sighted. There is no hesitation, no speculation, just beautiful bodies moving trustingly through space, responding to resonances and scents. This is surely an unconditional act. At first, he intends this performance to be his swan song – resonance, rhythms, fragrance, bodily accompaniment – all that he needs to shift to the invisible world. But soon he realizes that he can adapt and at the same time can find peace with his true self.
From The Forgotten Files - # 4
Dedicated to the women on Prose and others who cannot see this.
Believing in It All
I will never walk in shadows,
I will never live in fear,
I will fight for what I want,
and be damned if I shed tears.
I am woman, I am child,
I am strong, I will survive.
No one can stop me,
I step forward and remain alive.
I am wife, I am mother,
I am sister, I am friend,
I will never be less
than who I am, without end.
I am no less your equal,
and at times I may surpass
all that life may offer;
until I breathe my very last.
Until that day arrives,
I will shout from mountain high;
I am strong, I am a survivor,
and I believe I can fly.
Never doubt your belief,
hold the dream steadfast.
Walk the road to the perfect ending;
knowing you have reached your goal at last.
*****
3/6/2012
9:02 a.m. – 9:09 a.m.
Mud, a Storm, and a Cabin in Laos
Even when I light my cigarette, I think of you. I never used to smoke. At least, not like I do now. I remember us, in the complete dark, holding each other, walking barefoot in the mud because we said we wanted to feel like hippies. The rain was pouring down on us, sticking our clothes together and making our skin slippery, yet we held on. The only thing leading us back home was lightning illuminating the beaten path.
It was just one long straight road, after all. We only had to follow it, as we had over the past week, but today was different. It was just us.
I remember your goofy laugh and that childish smile. We weren’t doing anything out of this world. We were just walking through the rain, in the middle of a storm, trying to get home. It was almost a little scary, being there in the complete dark, trying to take us back in a place we had only been a few days but something about you made me feel brave and strong. At one point we even slipped and fell and our whole back and legs were covered to the brim with dirt and mud but we just laughed. I loved that. Anyone else would have taken it as a loss and felt defeated but you made it an adventure.
Finally we saw our little wooden cabin and walked up the rickety stairs to our little room with the hammocks on the balcony overlooking the Mekong River. We were both dirty, filthy, wet hippies walking barefoot in South East Asia and you never looked so beautiful. You grabbed the key from my hand and walked into the room and grabbed your pack of cigarettes and stormed back outside. You looked at me for a second with that devilish smile and kissed me. I put my hand out and grabbed a cigarette and lit yours for you. There we were. Lost on an island, sitting on our hammocks outside of a little wooden cabin smoking our cigarette.
Now you’re a few thousand miles away with him, and I’m alone. I never told you but it’s the only thing I can do that can make me feel close to you. I still think of you, even when I light my cigarette.
lucky
They called my name and your smile broke wide open. You grabbed my hands in yours to pull them to your face before you pushed your forehead to mine. We kissed quick with eyes open so I could see the specks of yellow in their blue, and then I was smiling too. You looked down at me, beaming. “You’re good luck.”