Oh, what a grand few days…

We look at another place I know I won’t like — I’m one of those who know — and I’m not overwhelmed. Expecting the deal to crumble in the end regardless, I stay on my best behavior and pretty much keep silent. (Mistake!) But right away, in the absence of my all-knowing analysis, the landlord’s new refrigerator and a big sunroom have her heart racing. She doesn’t even mind that the wooded lot that starts 20 feet from the tall south-facing windows has just been sold — yet who buys a quarter-acre in town just to look at the bushes?

The house has forced-air heat with outlets way up near the high ceilings. The furnace uses propane. There isn’t a woodstove worth mentioning. I see money flying out the door and being cold to boot. “That little electric heater sure does a great job in here,” the owner says, pointing to a unit in the corner of the sunroom. She’s a very nice person, but I’m wondering why a sunroom needs a heater. At night, maybe, in the absence of insulating drapes, but still. All this I take in but keep to myself instead of sharing with my partner, who’s practically dancing a jig. Surely she’ll stop and see the bedrooms are too small, I think to myself.

Evening rain

In the end of course she’s flying high, so I have to come clean and do so about half a mile after leaving the place: basically, I hate it and we’d freeze to death. There’s a long ride home, if you know what I mean, on which I take silence for wanting to hear more. Yes, even after almost 30 years, I can still be that stupid. It isn’t hard at all. The biggest irony is that she’s fucking brilliant when cornered and almost always does the right thing: if I’d confided in her all along, she might have pulled the plug herself. We notice different things, though. On her own, she might have plunked her piano down in that sunroom, plugged electric heaters in all the rooms, and just kept on truckin’. Still, we just came through the longest, coldest winter of my life. I want a fire to get cozy with.

This morning I flip out and have to “do something,” so I drive into town to read bulletin boards for housing notices. Pretty lame, but it gets me off my butt. Trying to shake something loose, I take a short side trip on the way home to visit the Mabel Dodge Luhan House [historical site & conference center] like someone suggested. Just an intuitive thing. I walk inside, but there isn’t a bulletin board or anyone to talk to. The vibes are good back there in the compound, though, and I don’t mind.

The air outside is sharply cool and damp from last night’s rain. As I creep down the tight little alley in first gear on the way out, the sunlight is warm and welcome by way of contrast. Halfway down the little hill I stop, incredulous: sitting in the dirt road looking up at me right below the open driver’s window is a HUGE GREEN BULLFROG the size of a cantelope! We stare at each other for a long moment, and then I drive on, checking in my rear-view mirror that I haven’t seen a mirage. I can’t tell you how many decades it’s been since I saw a frog like that, probably not since the early days of my life. It’s been years since I heard one, too. I know there’s a big pond at a nearby gallery tucked back in the trees, but this is still the high desert, and I just saw a goddamn bullfrog in the alley.

Cocktail hour view

Very tricky afternoon on my own. I sit down to do some boring detail work for a client, but my mind is a limpet that won’t let go of where it shouldn’t be. Then I have an idea. (You don’t need to know what it is, it’s just an idea that comes from something I see.) But of course I can do that, I say to myself. It’s as obvious as anything. Something lifts, and it’s like I’m back. Hey, I feel — well, normal… no, better than “normal.” What?? I see What Can Be. Outrageous!

And then, at the same time, AT THE VERY SAME TIME, I’m aware of the pain. The big pain, the all-encompassing thing that tries to kill me. I’m okay and the pain is still there, but I’m neither one. I ease toward the hurt for a test, almost close enough to fall in, then pull back to where there’s both at the same time.

Both. At. The. Same. Time.

Sitting outside just before sunset, I notice the plum tree branches blowing in the wind, yellow-white light flashing on the leaves. The tree is a pulsating field I’ve never seen before. It wants me to promise to remember.

Maybe we won’t exactly move, you know. Maybe something else is going on.

Well, crank up the worry machine. (Or not! read on…)

What I find most interesting about using the Internet for finding news is how much of what the rest of the world sees never makes it into American media consciousness. For example, all but a rear guard of 800 Australian troops just came home from Iraq to a joyous welcome in Brisbane, and I’ve only found mention of this at UK sites. (Folks are happy the troops are coming home? No news here, move along.) On the financial front, at least three European banks have issued dire warnings about the U.S. economy over the last few weeks, and that’s also been ignored — one authority flatly predicts a complete collapse of our financial system over the next few days or weeks, and I’ll bet you haven’t read that anywhere in these United States. In fact, the level of “serious” discourse on just about any heavy topic you’d care to name is so craven and bereft of elementary reasoning, you’d have to be some sort of chemically-reinforced Pollyanna to believe we’ve actually evolved at all over the last few hundred years. (And watch out what you put in your garden!)

My wife and I have this conversation frequently. The bottom line is that while some people have definitely experienced a growing peace, maturity and spiritual expansion, life in general has become more difficult and anxiety-ridden in our lifetimes. When I first joined the workforce after graduating from the University of Texas, incomes and expenses were much more closely matched, so much so that one simply didn’t have to worry if one had a job. In 1968 my first wife and I rented a wonderful home for $75/mo. (that was considered expensive), my car payments were $36/mo., and a visit to the doctor cost $5. I took home less than $500/mo. in salary from my college teaching job, we bought everything we wanted, and the money just piled up in my checking account, month after month. There wasn’t any need to save, because it happened automatically.

Late afternoon sun illuminating aquatic plants in mountain stream

The way things are today just isn’t going to fly. It won’t be “fixed” either, none of it, not until we start all over at the bottom, treat everyone as brothers and sisters, look each other squarely in the eye, and say something like, “Okay, what CAN you give me for these eggs my hens just laid? How much for this house, this car, my services? What do you need from me, and how can we help each other? How can we help those people in the next town who have no food or water? Can you give this teacher (doctor, policeman, farmer) a place to live so he or she can stay in the community?”

That kind of trust and self-reliance may produce miracles, but first one has to have an honest sense of “self.” That’s where inner work comes in. When you know you’re part of everything and simultaneously whole, you don’t need a guide for acting properly. It just happens automatically, like when my paychecks piled up in the bank. It’s like the Golden Rule and “all you need is love,” all rolled into one.

I don’t know what they are, but there they are.

Meanwhile, would we really be worse off without high-definition TV, the Internet, computers, air-conditioned cars, and microwaves? Would it really hurt to talk to ancestors in our dreams and fly to distant lands by willing it so? Do you really believe the energy that fuels your thoughts just vanishes with your body? Is there some reason our bodies “have to” deteriorate? — why can’t we just live until we die? After all, SOME FOLKS ALREADY DO!

And on and on and on…

We’ve been sucking up the patriarchal bullshit and imbalance for the last few thousand years — doing the best we could, you understand — and now it looks like something’s gonna blow, only maybe not all at once. I hope not. Frankly, I think it must have started years ago, because I’ve felt this way since I was in my teens. I never wanted the brick house in the suburbs anyway, much less the station wagon in the drive. Not only was it silly (to me), it was also built on sand.

That’s one reason why I wanted to move to northern New Mexico, where things have always been “blown up.” Not that far to fall if things go bad, in other words. Fewer people, too, just 14 per square mile on the average in Taos County, which by the way is just a little smaller than Connecticut. But I mainly wanted to live the last half of my life in a place where Nature dominates man, and not the other way around. That’s why I go walking in the mountains when I get the chance: something happens to me in the high country that never even registers amidst the mini-marts and parking lots. I sense things one can’t put into words without diminishing the experience, although I give it my best shot because I want to share this stuff. I don’t know what’s happening, either, but a hit of what’s above 8,000 feet makes me want to go back for more, and I think this is related to the bigger question.

It could be that everything will be just fine, after all, only…um… different.

Ya know??

That’s what she called him, “Lumpy.”

For the two or three people in the whole world who might understand what I’m talking about, that’s what yet another Maryland friend emailed me when I told her who had died on Wednesday. I didn’t even know he had a nickname, but then she might have gone to high school with him, and of course I didn’t, having moved there back in ‘75. Lumpy? I knew him as Jay.

The news is part of a larger medicine show. It’s strange, the effect it’s all having on me… as if I’m actually a member of the human race. A long time coming too, because growing up an Air Force brat with over 40 changes of residence when I was a kid is like being cast in iron. During my school years, I never had a friend for more than a few months at a time, so I guess I never really knew what other folks considered normal. I always had to just let everybody go.

For the last nine years in Taos, I’ve had to look at every unpatched hole and all the scary monsters. It’s taken me all this time to stop walking around with the old landscapes in my head, too. It was as if the past might grab me if I weren’t careful, pull me back and mangle my soul. I haven’t exactly been pining for old scenes of late, but there was always this self-doubting incompleteness that made me wonder. Guilt, actually, I realize.

Hearing about Lumpy is part of what makes me feel connected today, and yet that also frees me. I didn’t expect that! It’s as if acknowledging my past also means I don’t “have” to go back. I feel a circle’s been completed, like everything’s OK, like I just gave myself permission to truly get on with living where I am.

Can you believe it took nine years?

The previous post has a comment by someone I didn’t recognize. He lives in the Cascade foothills and writes at a blog you need to visit, The Farmer de Ville Chronicles. Outstanding writing, as usual a wake-up call to me to stick to what’s real and all around me. He must have a regular writing gig, and I’m ashamed that I don’t know about it.

His lifestyle reminds me of where I’m always heading in my own life, aside from lengthy detours through what most of you would call the “real world,” except of course that it isn’t — not the one God gave us, at any rate. I always arouse a kind of snarly, defensive sensibility when I make that point, that 90 percent of what we think is proper living is actually a kind of killing joke. Not surprisingly, most of us take umbrage at assertions that we live on top of a house of cards of printed lies and misconceptions. Well, too bad. It’s true, however. As true as true can be. This isn’t what you think it is and won’t turn out to be what you expect.

Spend some time reading what the Farmer has to say. Smell the herbs and feel the sweat dripping off the end of your nose.

Something is changing deep inside.

There are many, many clues. The biggest one is where the sense of calm expansion lies, a realm where nothing matters except trust. I’m doing things that “make no sense” but feel like openings or signals. A natural strength arises, outside of intellect and culture. I must have more of this.

I must explore.

That takes in a lot of territory, so I’d better be more specific. I’m talking about something that happened at ZoukFest, and right away that makes it tricky to describe.

There’s nothing quite like ZoukFest. Not only are the instructors all world-class musicians, but we all eat, sleep, and share bathrooms together. There’s no special physical status for the staff. This makes for a constant roar of musical activity, inside and outside of class, since everyone is part of the same temporary community. Most nights after the staff performances, there are spontaneous jam sessions going on all over the place, including the special breed of Irish session that Celtic music fans will recognize, where a solo instrument leads off with one tune after another, and everyone follows along. That’s the kind I visited on Friday night, only by the time I got there, most of the amateurs had gone to bed, leaving the field wide open for the pros.

The talent at 3:00 a.m.

The majority of people in that shot make their living playing music. I’m not going to identify them, but some of you would recognize the names. There was plenty of drinking going on, and the music got wilder and wilder. Other musicians wandered in and out as the level of musical and chemical intoxication rose ever higher. There wasn’t any rowdiness, just an altered state of consciousness one only sees with booze in special circumstances. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see people dancing on the tables, although no one did. I sensed a wild looseness. In the relaxed, non-aggressive state of being focused on the music, other spirits gained release.

I’ve rarely been happier to just “be” in a place and time. That’s why I call it the “best jam session ever,” not for reason exclusively of music. When I decided to go to my room at 4:30 a.m. after tequila, wine, and swigging Bushmill’s from the bottle, two of my gentlemanly associates allowed as how they’d rather just stay up all night instead of going to bed. They did, too! I turned out the light at around 5:00 a.m., just as dawn was graying in the east, and got up two hours later for breakfast. None the worse for wear, I might add, thanks to the gallon of lemonade I drank to wash down vitamin C and Ibuprofen.

It actually wasn’t hard to get up at all, but I’m not sure if that’s a feature or a bug.

Oh man, Bo Diddley died today, and I’m sitting here with tears running down my face. What joy that man brought into this world. I finally got to hear him play in Santa Fe, back in January of ‘04, and wrote about it in one of my old GRACK! columns that I later developed into a full-length article for Horse Fly. What follows is that longer piece, by way of tribute.

Here’s to you, Bo: may you keep on rockin’ through those pearly gates…

Bad Seed Blessing
by John H. Farr

Bo Diddley at the Lensic?

I was broke and might die tomorrow, but no way was St. Peter gonna wave me through that gate if I didn’t grab a credit card and go: “You say you passed up your last chance to see Bo Diddley in person? GIT ON OUTA HERE!” So that was that.

At the very last minute, the Ford wouldn’t start. No buzz, no click, no nothin’. The last time this had happened, I was halfway across Cebolla Mesa. That time I’d gotten the juice flowing in the F-150 by banging on the battery posts with a wrench, so I tried it again and got the cab light to come on. This showed me I was on the right track, so I took off the cables and gave everything a scrub with a wire brush. When I refastened the clamps, I knew it would start. It did, and off I flew.

Getting from Llano to downtown Santa Fe in a little over an hour is possible, but it ain’t pretty. Once there, I took a quick walk to clear my head and then hurried to take my seat. Right away I recognized Bo’s famous custom-built “square” guitar resting on a chair. That also meant he’d be sitting down, old blues-man-style, but hey, the guy was 75.

Bo Diddley’s guitar, photographed at intermission

As it turned out, someone forgot to tell him. My boyhood idol came out and played for almost two and one-half hours straight, no breaks, accompanied by the very capable Alex Maryol Band, who’d opened for him as well. Bo played the old songs, some blues, even a rap number I swear he made up on the spot. He was loose and he was happy. “You got my back, right?” he’d say off-mike to Alex, then hit the special effects built into his guitar and take off into uncharted musical space, laughing all the way.

It wasn’t so much the music as the man himself that had me reeling through one wave of emotion after another. Twice I found myself all choked up and wondering why. Whatever it was that went through the heart and soul of the 10-year-old boy who first heard Bo Diddley on Armed Forces Radio in Germany in 1955 was special, all right. If I could put it in a bottle or a book, it would save the world. When he finally announced his last number and launched into a classic Diddley romp with his signature beat, I didn’t want the feeling to end. It didn’t, either.

Without explanation or intro, Bo changed his mind and jumped right into “Bad Seed,” a song about going through life his own special way and nobody else’s. In between verses he asked all the “bad seeds” in the audience to stand up, and some of them did. I was trying to take a picture and stayed in my seat. I already knew who I was, anyway.

On the way home I stopped at a Pojoaque mini-mart that was just about to close, nobody there but me and the law. My hair was flying in the breeze as I swung down out of the cab. Inside, I felt the tribal cops’ eyes on me as I put too much fake cheese on a cold hot dog and fumbled with the foam cup for my coffee. Shades of times past! Climbing back into the truck, I just had to smile: Man, do you think I’d look like this if I was holding?

All the way back, I never saw another car until I’d climbed out of the canyon. The three elk standing by the side of the road just past the Horseshoe let me pass but woke me up good, so I slid into Llano and played my electric guitar until four in the morning. I don’t think the landlord heard me.

He’s real polite though, and probably wouldn’t say.

I took other pictures at that concert, most of which didn’t turn out so well. This is the best one I have of Bo. It captures a certain energy, but of course you had to be there — and now none of us can anymore:

The one and only Bo

I want to write about the heart. I can’t possibly finish this in a blog post, but I want to start.

Today I know that now, right now, is the beginning of the rest of my life, on which there are no limits. The “secret” is being true to myself, the fact of which I’m only beginning to feel. True to my true nature, I should say, in the context of a calm, slowly building joy and union with with all Creation. This isn’t an intellectual exercise. The locus is the natural world.

I grew up with a thousand reasons to be unhappy. In my case, it’s partly psycho-genetic. My granddad used to take the train from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia for a day to visit art museums. My grandmother, daughter of a “shoutin’ Methodist” circuit riding preacher in West Virginia, wouldn’t hear of it. “What’s the point of that,” she’d reprimand him, “there’s nothing there but pictures on a wall!” — but he’d go anyway. I never really got to know him — he died while we were overseas and I was 10 years old — and I wish I had. I’d like to ask him what he felt about those paintings and what they meant to him, since there was not a stick of anything you’d call art in Granny’s house when I came back to Chestertown as a grownup.

One day Granny gave me her father’s saddlebags, however. That’s right, my great-grandfather used to ride a mule to a different church every Sunday, before he landed a regular parish gig in his later years. I kept those saddlebags for a long time, until my aunt in Maine asked for them back, a typical Farr family manuever. That was only a few years ago, mind you, and though I deeply resented her asking, I realized the only way to avoid more injury to myself was to send them back immediately, along with every other family artifact in my possession. I had quite a collection, too. I’d come to sense that these things were actually poisonous, although sometime in the late ’80s I’d exorcised the saddlebags by taking them to my great-grandfather’s grave in Parsons, West Virginia and smoking a pipeful of dope, exhaling over his tombstone. She doesn’t know that and probably never will — shortly after I sent the musty relics back to Vassalboro, she walked out of her house and tripped, hitting her head on a rock, and hasn’t been the same since.

They can’t hurt me any more, I can only hurt myself (as I was taught to do). Hurt follows hurt, and love follows love.

I give myself permission to be. The sound you hear is singing in the blood.

It’s easy to tell when things need examining. I lose my bearings, I bleed, and fall completely under the power of buried knots of energy. Maybe I should call them clots, because they stifle the circulation of love.

Today, for example, when compulsive reading of blogs was like squatting naked in a vat of acid, I was tearing myself to shreds over not finding a house for us. Absurd on both counts, but there it was, only why? Out of the miasma floated a clue in the process of recalling an unloving aunt back East who very nearly did me in a few years ago. The curse of my family is a total lack of empathy, which describes her perfectly. Though well into her 90s, she’ll never die, like Dracula. When her brothers were alive, the three of them together could suck all the joy out of the air. On hideously hot, humid summer days in my grandmother’s house, when even the wooden floorboards would burn your bare feet, they’d sit silently in the living room with the fan blowing, waiting for something to criticize. If I was lucky, there’d be somewhere to go outside and play, if I could stand it. (In the 1950s, we called this the American Dream.)

And to think, to this day, that my old friends in Maryland still don’t get why I left the scene of the crime! Well, maybe some do — I can think of a couple — but most of them don’t, I’m sure. How could they? No one talked about such things, and 10 years ago, I didn’t really know why myself, only that I had to get the hell out. The family connection was just a part of it, of course, but a vital one, and even the cornfields stinking of plant sperm under white August skies must have reminded me of it on some deeper level.

The utterly different surroundings of northern New Mexico were a good place to come. Crucifixions abound, bloody Jesuses everywhere, darkness and light in a landscape of giants. The opening here is Spirit — universal replacement parts! — though not without a lot of work. (This little essay is one of the tasks.)

Springtime in the Rockies, this very day

This morning I angered my wife, who kept her tongue fastened, refusing to argue. She knows full well when I’ve entered the ancestral zone: the lifeless monotone and reluctance to speak, the stumbling around for someone to blame. Distance means nothing. She feels it from light-years away but refuses to be caught, 90 pounds of empathic fury in self-protection mode.

This afternoon she went to the grocery store. I mumbled a greeting when she returned and helped unload the car. When I went back to my desk, there was a decorated envelope with my name on it. Inside was a beautiful card with the inscription, “You are a very special part of my universe.” Underneath she had written:

“I love you no matter what!”

It was signed with a little heart and her initials. I cracked. Later, after dinner, I climbed down from the cross.

That is how this works, so never be afraid to go there.

Possibly the most insightful and on-the-money essay most of us will ever read, Mutiny of the Soul, by Charles Eisenstein at Reality Sandwich. Here’s an excerpt:

Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.

We don’t “fix” our situation, we step outside of it into something completely new, and I mean new inside your head to start with. Here’s another taste, but please read the whole thing. I agree with every single word:

When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us.