Bright Boles in a Fading Light

I was bundled up, truncated -
syntax out of whack,
trying on personae like pairs of jeans.
I was profligate.

I wriggled on the vine in ever newer colds.
I was parasitic to my self.
My chrysalis was my boredom.
Which is not to say that I've come out better.
Love doesn't redeem per se.


Everyone stands naked at some point during the day.
Takes stock of themselves.
Chooses to live.  Or doesn't.
This is an absurd but necessary point.

Every love story doesn't end.
Every love story is ultimately inexplicable.
Every love story includes some, or many, distances physical and emotional.
Every love story is a mountain range somehow always shrouded in mist.

Every love story is a hyacinth in July.
And a lilac in November.
Every love story is a trace of every other.
Every love story is every ripple of every river that ever went to the sea, every magenta and ochre air put on by the hale hardwoods of the west, every glance of an eye across the world, every touch and sound and scrape of skin.
Every love story is a fascination with ephemera.  Thumbs.  A particular smell.  A single, private memory.
Every love story doesn't end.

Can you 'explain to me how we're so immediately alive'?

Can you begin to account for this?

What has been will be and what is remains indelibly.
I can trace your face a thousand times and never limn it.

What is slaked by you is not lust.

Where the night-time monsters live we have made a home.
And where the day-time monsters roam we dance.

Mountain passes will take you to others' arms.
Forgotten ponds rimmed with aspen will drown me.
Skies will plume with all manner of cloud and days.
Moons will appear like the passes of a sickle in a wheat field.
But we, body and spirit, are inseparable despite what lays between here and there.

I'll see you in my dreams.



Inspiration provided by "I'm Only Now Beginning to Answer Your Letter" by Olena Kalytiak Davis.

The night's come again, my dear boy, and this time it's for good.
Don't worry, your legs going out from under you is supposed to happen.
Come here, sweetheart.  Come close.  I know.  This is weird.

Now your weight is pressed against me,
now your enlarged heart is echoing life in your chest,
now you can only stare straight ahead while we wait for
the rest.  Minutes pass.  
Lock eyes for the last time.  There are whole skies
in them.  Always have been.  Stars wheeling around, rearranging, wind through the wail
of our days together, loud laughter and wet mornings with soaking dews.
I hit you once.  I hope you didn't hold that against me.
Just lean into me.  He'll be back soon and this will be over.
Thank you for saving my life back there.  We had our time and I'll 
always cherish it.  It's not your fault I couldn't keep you afterwards.

The light is flickering annoyingly at irregular intervals.
Doctor back.
Can you still see that?
Second injection.

Your soft pink tongue leaks out of a numb mouth.  Can't stop crying.
 
No moment, just all and then none.  He's gone before half the liquid's in.
We are with each other here and forever.  This 
lasts, I tell myself.  This lasts.  And, never again.  But there will be again.

We'll let have you have as much time as you need.  Just leave him here when you're done.  We'll take care of the rest.

Okay.  Thank you.
 
You're the most innocent being I've ever known and I'm sorry 
for this.  I know you don't understand.  I don't really either.  This or anything.
At least it was in my arms.  Most don't
get that.  At times lately that has seemed the most selfish thought
I've ever had.

I lay him on his right side.  Facing north.  Close his eyes.  Close the door.





I miss you, jaxypants.

Attempts at a new fiction

I have never been able to sit still for very long.  After a while I begin to suffer shortness of breath and my body tingles and feels as though somehow it might be also existing simultaneously in some other indeterminate place.  Even my brief encounters with joy are coterminous with a certain wanderlust.  I have always, ever since childhood, felt acutely lost (though I know perfectly well that I am not) and lonely, which I've never really been either, in the literal sense of the word.  For example, in the midst of intense conversation, or even sometimes in the act of making love, I have the gnawing awareness that I am separate, that from somewhere outside me I am being limned by an invisible, yet everpresent, hand.  It is impossible for me to not think of myself in this way, constantly being redrawn, reworked, the shading done so that I am always partially, at least, steeped in darkness, the shadows, as it were, creeping always a little over me.  And yet, I wouldn't call myself an unhappy person.  On the contrary, I've experienced an abundance, I would say, and that being touched with melancholy only intensifies the good.

But even now, writing these lines, I feel an overwhelming sense that I must move about, that the act of writing itself is somehow to be avoided, and that the issuance of this behavior is contained even in the enzymes of my body.  And this is the beginning of my madness.

Presenting a tidy appearance to the world, much less writing, is daily an heroic activity.  Both have small windows of opportunity before the elan of alcohol and crippling self-doubt move in like barbarian hordes.  I am, in fact, a connoisseur of this space between clarity and conscious (and moral) manumission. I have the lurking sense that I'll never be able to write another word, smile again at my beloved, taste a wine I have desired.  This is both what drives me forward and cripples me.  I am wrecked against my own will.  And then there comes release, and wildness, and then the process starts all over again the next day.

A poem written by a moth that I read often.

She came around the corner 

to see body-sized mounds of rags and debris.

They could have been the warm torsos and arms

of the dead, wrapped in plastic and cloth, 

that she wasn't supposed to see

at the age of eleven or twelve.

Or twenty-five.

But they weren't.

No, they were not.

They were everything and nothing.

Like the brown paper bag

that caresses the curb under unseen stars.

Or the weeping un-heartbeat

of the car's turning signal.

Its melodic sobs asynchronous

with any other's.

Signal, it is. 

To listen.

The drive home is silent but for the city.

A moth's wing and a wet nose greet her at the door.

Coxcombs and Breadcrumbs

"...And I wanted that heat so bad
I could taste the fire on your breath
and I wanted in your storm so bad
I could taste the lightning on your breath
I watched you hold the sun in your arms while he bled to death
he grew so pale next to you
the world is so pale next to you
your hair is coxcomb red your eyes are viper black

you said every road is a good road
between the next road and your last road
every love is your best love and every love is your last love
and every kiss is a goodbye..."

excerpts from Coxcomb Red by Jason Molina

Some notes on the hum of the mind

Endlessly these eddies curl and compact and stretch out.  Dissipate.  Arise.  Morph.

The mind, if this is where such things take place, is really a kind of fluid atmosphere, driven as much by chaos as by anything else.  Sanity in this way could be seen as a kind of order, however brief.  An island of negentropy.  Insanity the opposite.  And myriad kinds of intermediate stages existing not long enough to even be recognized.

It is as possible to observe this as it is possible a body of water doing the same thing.

Is the observation of one's own mind itself a kind of eddy?  A brief gathering of substrate (which is an absurd, but convenient, way of speaking because thoughts and mental projections are not measurable) in the flow?

What is it that allows for this to happen?  Who is it that can conjure?

Does the flow in which I exist flow into you?

It must.

trestles

light       river      skin

swallows move incessantly between the swaying cottonwoods

what could i have said? 


------

sweat becomes a manner of speaking.
speaking is a palpitating creation always just formed, forming.


------

"notes for future use"

- mouth as ampullae of Lorenzini
- mouth as Da Vinci's reputed circle
- body as palmate  (over your palmate body chivalry goes out the window)
- body as an espalier


------

it has been argued (Scarry, E.) that we want to replicate what we find beautiful.  that this, in fact, makes us better, more capable of spontaneously being just, loving, kind creatures.

take my hand.  let's go to bed right now.

------

light      river     skin

a nameless place.
laughter.  curled desire and an ease that didn't come easy.  until it did.

what could i have said?

summer in sierra

6.19:  alta peak.  early start.  bear at panther gap.  peeks out from behind a hedgerow.  clap hands.  "go on bear!"  ten seconds later it changes its mind and bolts across the trail twenty feet in front of us. 

meet a backcountry crew.  they invite us to stretch with them.  such are the humors of long days without contact with the outside world.  one time a trail crew competed to see who could reach an inflatable caterpillar placed in the middle of an alpine lake while riding a blow-up dolphin and using a stick as an oar.  passing hikers called it in thinking something was amiss. 

(a recurring announcement in the sac airport is to report any suspicious activity or luggage left unattended)

sign the logbook at the summit.  tried to get a signal.  none.  relief and worry.  one drops away after a few moments.

6.20: four bears today.  kept a sequoia seedling and pressed it.  several acorn woodpeckers. mountain chickadees.  "chick a dee".  "chick a
dee".  first note is high, the second two descend a fifth. 

is that you saying something to me?  i'm positive i can communicate with you thru them.  can you hear me?

halfway thru a general sherman ipa.  undisguised and naked at wolverton.  warm rock, hot sun.  glacial polish.  wash off the day's work in mountain water.  dappled shade of lodgepole pines.  a burnt out husk of a ponderosa.  water skeeters.  i think of whitman's naked bathers.  would he like what saw if he saw me?   i open myself for the earth.  for the memory of walt's eyes.  that old perv.  welcome the sun on skin that doesn't see the light normally.  slip back into the water.  it hurts to be so fervently cold at first.  the breath leaves you.  goosebumps radiate over the body.  then relax.  then back onto the hot smooth rock.  the dirt and the water commingling in rivulets over my chest.  bright skin.  where is a tongue when you need one?

a thought today:  what if I just didn't leave?  didn't.  park service would pay for lodging and food thru the end of september.  I'm coming close.

 i write these words looking west over visalia at 7000'.

vernal equinox tomorrow.  new moon yesterday.  of stars.

6.23:  hermit thrush singing for twenty minutes this morning.

6.24:  need to check out Hanshan.  was wished easy transitions yesterday.  i know what she means today.  spent the night in sac.  bright clean.  constant music. intermittent announcements.  comings and goings of the nameless.  only two nights ago i slept with a spotted owl for company.

this seems like a descent.

6.28  sure enough.  seattle.  i walk to get coffee.  i'm lost.  the birds aren't talking to me.  the squirrels don't make sense.  i will not see a bear today.  and there is nothing watching for me from deep inside the woods.

there is only the hum of cars outside my window.
 mountain time and city time are not the same. 

i hold the last piece of clothing not washed to my nose and smell the pine and the smoke and the magic.

Exhale

Torn out of time.
Thuja boles buttress mercury skies.
This our music: frantic flowers
shedding petals even as they
bloomed.  Your feet wet with
dew covered in them.  Me kissing
them clean.  Laughter.
Even now sapphires turn in the mud.

The prodigy of our genius is this:
We have been made redeemable in love.
And the vespers of sweat made last in the
mind much longer than on the skin.

A Tree Telling of Orpheus by Denise Levertov

White dawn. Stillness.      When the rippling began
    I took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
    of salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.

          Yet the rippling drew nearer — and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
                  Yet I was not afraid, only
                  deeply alert.

I was the first to see him, for I grew
    out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
                              twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
  more like a flower's.
                    He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
                        came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
    as if rain
          rose from below and around me
    instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
    I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
    what the lark knows; all my sap
          was mounting towards the sun that by now
              had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.

        He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:
          the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! there was no twig of me not
                        trembling with joy and fear.

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
                    came into my roots
                        out of the earth,
                    into my bark
                        out of the air,
                    into the pores of my greenest shoots
                        gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys,
          of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
    of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots…
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
              and I, a tree, understood words — ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
                        grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.   
   
                          Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
    As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
    were both frost and fire, its chord flamed
up to the crown of me.

              I was seed again.
                    I was fern in the swamp.
                        I was coal.

And at the heart of my wood
(so close I was to becoming man or god)
    there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
          something akin to what men call boredom,
                                  something
(the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)
          that gives to a candle a coldness
              in the midst of its burning, he said.

It was then,
          when in the blaze of his power that
                    reached me and changed me
          I thought I should fall my length,
that the singer began
              to leave me.      Slowly
          moved from my noon shadow
                                  to open light,
words leaping and dancing over his shoulders
back to me
          rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming
slowly again
          ripple.

And I              in terror
                    but not in doubt of
                                  what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
              wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand year's layers of dead leaves,
    rolling the rocks away,
                    breaking themselves
                                      out of
                                  their depths.   
   
  You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
                    of the singing
so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,
              no wind but the rush of our
          branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.
                    But the music!
                                The music reached us.
Clumsily,
    stumbling over our own roots,
                            rustling our leaves
                                        in answer,
we moved, we followed.

All day we followed, up hill and down.
                              We learned to dance,
for he would stop, where the ground was flat,
                                  and words he said
taught us to leap and to wind in and out
around one another    in figures    the lyre's measure designed.

The singer
          laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.
                                        At sunset
we came to this place I stand in, this knoll
with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
          In the last light of that day his song became
farewell.
          He stilled our longing.
          He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet
                                        we could almost
                              not hear it in the
                                  moonless dark.
By dawn he was gone.
                    We have stood here since,
in our new life.
              We have waited.
                        He does not return.
It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost
what he sought.
              It is said they felled him
and cut up his limbs for firewood.
                                  And it is said
his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.
Perhaps he will not return.
                        But what we have lived
comes back to us.
              We see more.
                        We feel, as our rings increase,
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
                                        leaf-tips
further.
    The wind, the birds,
                        do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music!

sometimes staying home is like a vision quest.

you don't always have to go up a mountain, or travel

vast distances to meet the world as it really is.  you can still fast,

go without water if you want to.  have morning coffee though,

if you normally.

be gentle.  be vigilant.  meet the careening armies of

your past with great strength (it's there), with wildflowers in your

hair and hands. employ all the animals you know - bears, rattlesnakes,

owls, cougars, wolverines, bumble bees, crows, ants -

on your behalf.   let them carry banners pronouncing,

"not here. not anymore. you may not remain here".

they will.  you are loved.  so much it's a matter of life and death.

it will seem strange.  it will seem like you don't deserve it.  you do.

but don't look to be liked.  don't look for answers.  or sources.

don't want to be healed.  or be over this.  keep very careful watch

on the soft ground you've cordoned off.  and then don't.

the trick, at first,  is being able to let things close, right up

to your line-in-the-sand

without letting them in.  they'll eventually lose interest.

but they won't disappear.  a breakthrough is to find that

you don't want them to.  it would be an augur that something is amiss.

they should come back from time to time.  that's perfectly normal.

they're part of you after all.  welcome them.   then dissolve them.

another breakthrough would be to see the world through them.

 at will.  with unbounded compassion. that is one definition

of 'unbounded compassion'.  another is to expect no thing.

and always remember to keep admiring the birds.

i remember losing a shoe last time this happened

changes.  the more i continue down this path, the more i tap into creative parts which are completely contradictory to writing about running.  and, after weighing the relative merits of maintaining a blog for each (running and not), i've decided to consolidate and write what feels right at the moment under the "lupine and daisy" rubric.  i have a feeling most of this will be poetry.  that's just what it boils down to for me. it's been this way since i was eighteen and i was writing poetry about submarines and a son of mine that still hasn't been born - thank god. i've moved on to flowers and mountains and genitalia (they're all the same, by the way).  but it's still the same basic view of the world.  i don't really think any other way for very long.  i'm starting to think of this forum as one long lieder cycle for me.  i've toyed with taking that to more formal places in terms of maybe doing a long trip and writing a poem each day to document the progress instead of, say, a travelogue, but that seems like too much pressure just yet.  i'll keep it informal.  i do see patterns developing, lupine and daisy each are emerging leitmotifs for me, tropes meant to invoke very specific persons, places.  and i like that.  i like that there might be some digging, some thinking on the readers' part to follow me.  and if there is none of that, that's fine too.  maybe there is something to build on.

i write this of course for myself.  this thought, this change of course is merely an abandoned sand bank.  the course of the river has moved elsewhere. 

i'll see you on the other side.

from THE LOVE POEMS OF MARICHIKO

I

"I sit at my desk.
What can I write to you?
Sick with love,
I love to see you in the flesh.
I can write only,
"I love you.  I love you.  I love you."

Love cuts through my heart
and tears my vitals.
Spasms of longing suffocate me
and will not stop.

IX

You wake me,
Part my thighs, kiss me.
I give you the dew
Of the first morning of the world.

XVII

Let us sleep together here tonight.
Tomorrow, who knows where we will sleep?
Maybe tomorrow we will lie in the fields,
Our heads on the rocks.

XXIV

I scream as you bite
my nipples, and orgasm
drains my body, as if I had
been cut in two.

XXXVI

I am sad this morning.
The fog was so dense,
I could not see your shadow
as you passed my shoji.

XXXI

Some day six inches of
ashes will be all
that's left of our passionate minds,
of all the world created
by our love, its origin
and passing away.


XXXII

I hold your head tight between
my thighs, and float away
forever, in an orchid
boat on the River of Heaven."



translated by K. Rexroth, 1978ish

Falling in Love in the Time of Slime Mold

some slimes (myxomycetes) begin life as protoplasm,
can move, can ingest nutrients, do
show sacrificial behavior, do exhibit group dynamics, can find their
way back together if separated, that is, they
"are no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath"
but act as though they had "simple brains".  as such
they are no longer classed as fungi.

i saw several Chocolate Slime Molds on Granite Mt.
and found that I had much sympathy for them.
could have been me there on the end of the boot.  and you.  maybe
we were there and will be again. who could say?
maybe we'd grow out of my corpse. that wouldn't be so bad.
that would  be the perpetual spirit carrying on i guess.

i'd lift you up to get at
that leaf, or light, or shove a sporangia right up through me
to make more of us.  and be born again without hubris.
i'd do that.  i'd find you.  i'd hold tight if need be.  i'd let
go if need be too.  i bet we'd laugh as we
rolled around the forest floor shoving our cytoplasm back and
forth like kids inside those roll inside inflatable balls.  we'd never have to stop.

much of what i write is done while listening to music.  which is probably why most of my blog is riddled with mistakes grammatical, syntactical and logical, if not imaginative.  it's hard to see the keyboard sometimes behind tears.  or behind closed eyes altogether.  today's bit was done while this was playing.  go ahead.  get yer kleenex out now.

fairy slippers (Calypso bulbosa)

stopped to pick fireweed leaves for tea
underneath Granite Mountain. tinkham rd.  exit 47.

worked my way up through the avy chutes on the south face
but got a little concerned shortly thereafter

about the fact that there was still a good amount
of snow above me and the day was getting hot.  turned back.

late start.  did see a sooty grouse strutting wildly back and forth.
tail feathers splayed out like a turkey's.  two huge white

rings on his neck, flexing.  sprinted after him to
see if he'd drop a feather in his panic.  nope.

calypso orchids look like something lewis carroll would have
liked. trillium just hitting the upper slopes.  salmonberries

still need a week or two.  all this.  (a sweep of the eye).
"you mean there's a senator for all this?"

I had to go and sit while my brain ran around.
I had to go and sit while it played killdeer.
I had to sleep with my eyes being crows
with my feet being the mountains
with my cock being the spring river
with my hands the stars.
my teeth turned to bark
my mouth to roots
nose to leaves

----

we took off our skins and laid down inside each other and in
the headwaters made
what became in time a third

while down-
stream

---

I watched a junco (junco hyemalis) catch a wasp over the fire pit, go
clean its beak on the vine maple.
I'm staying with them.
They say, "the sharper the knife, the cleaner the line of carving."
They say, learn the names of as many of us as you can.

----

 the night sky was filled with birds

----

the wind moves

the mountain moves

we move

----

The song and the quill and the life given.
All the dappled shade there ever was gathered up at once.
The sound and shape of rising rivers darkening
to umber embankments year after year.
The multitude of ways to say love.

i said to the mountain, "you are the most beautiful mountain i have ever seen".

i said to my love, "you are the most beautiful woman i have ever seen".

charms

And

after letting go of wanting that little Jay feather I went and sat in the park in a golden light yesterday.  I took off my shoes and socks, folded my legs beneath me and resolved to watch the world for a few minutes. No expectations. Sometime into my vigil, I don't remember how long exactly, from the corner of my eye I saw there was a feather flickering in the grass.  

A Stellar's Jay feather

I found a Stellar's Jay feather yesterday down in an alley by my house.  Most of my immediates think of them as bullies or nuisances, and they might be.  And they, in turn, might think the same of us.  But I find them beautiful.  So when I found this little feather with light blue coloration on one side of the quill and cream on the other, I was delighted.  I placed it carefully in a little edition of Leaves of Grass that I sometimes carry, mostly as an affectation.  When I got home a little later, having remembered that it was tucked away in the book in my jacket, I went to retrieve it.  But it was gone.  Every once in a while I get the notion to look again.  Scour the pockets, flip through the book like a deck of cards.  But I don't.  I just smile.

Meditation on the Manis Mastodon

softly        reclining       Majestic

ringed on 3 sides by littorals

fresh out of the ice,
robes of suprabundance, florabundance
whose stubble was once a feral beard of
conifers growing for close on 2500 miles.  two thousand five hundred.
north to south.

you go scouring for answers.
the mind just doesn't hold such things.

and the blueheron waits for a minnow
to make its one unlucky move of the day.
blueheron can't afford to be unlucky.

and so won't.

you're holding wet lilacs to your breast.  it is the season of lilacs.
the season of procreation and replication.  of contribution.

will you?

every now and then a purple blossom shakes free, tumbles
down your naked body, comes to rest on an erect lupine nipple
or catches in your balsamroot pubic hair -

- you brought me lilac sprigs and eucalyptus in a hard rain, in a feverish dream.

i still smell them, the scent is still fresh on my skin

of bent grasses blowing uphill in the late afternoons of
ghosts of Pleistocene pelages hunted to extinction of
songs and myths and words themselves loosed over the land wildly
around campsites and in the ashes of pre-Clovis campfires and the spilled blood
of death and birth in the first human cries of babies raised in both hands to the sky and
the last cries of
the dying

breath.  think of that.  

i think douglas fir is the shadow of god espaliered

of perfect stillness

and the rising and falling

and how good things multiply of themselves, bonum diffusivum est

 
i wake each night under Ursa Major
and each night too Lyrid meteors arc thru it
and the doug firs frame the dream-mandala like
gnarled fingers of the old earth cupped.

every night i rise to meet it one or more parts or the whole of me

o lord i jumble myself before you.
i am a solitary oxeye daisy cleaved to your supple chest.

you, love, are not god.

but an eddy, a form constantly                         wondrously                        

                 easily                           ever so briefly overcoming entropy

overcome me before you swirl away like smoke

changing

Love the Human

(A little reminder to be wild and graceful, respectful and loyal, and to never stop going out in it.)



WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW TO BE A POET

all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
                                      and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;

kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
                              and maidens perfum'd and golden -

& then love the human: wives    husbands   and friends.

children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd.     exhaustion,
                            hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy.
silent solitary illumination, entasy.

real danger.     gambles.    and the edge of death.



Gary Snyder, 1970

To be a bird

"To go beyond and become what - a seagull on a reef?  Why not.  Our nature is no particular nature; look out across the beach at the gulls.  For an empty moment while their soar and cry enters your heart like a sunshaft through water, you are that, totally.  We do this every day.  So this is the aspect of mind that gives art, style, and self-transcendence to the inescapable human plantedness in a social and ecological nexus.  The challenge is to do it well, by your neighbors and by the trees, and maybe once in a great while we can get where we see through the same eye at the same time, for a moment.  That would be doing it well."  Gary Snyder

Sometimes when I've been reading Snyder I'll stop and say "holy fuck, has this guy had access to my things?"  He writes, often enough to be unsettling, the uncreated yet creating consciousness in me.  I've been interested lately in the idea of crossing over.  Not to some metaphysical "other" plane like television psychics claim to.  Nor precisely like biology means either, though it is closer, a process in which two chromosomes pair up and exchange genetic information resulting in unique genetic material and thus, diversity.  I mean crossing species.  I mean imagining yourself as that particular junco right now.  What sensations would I be feeling?  Would the early afternoon sunlight still seem dappled?  That breeze that's just risen from its lunch up-canyon, how would that feel on my feathers?  Could I see air?

This might seem strange to many of us, but it's really got quite a long history.  In both Buddhist iconography and Native American art there is an intermingling of 'animal' and 'human' eyes.  In Western mythology of course the examples are innumerable of humans becoming and unbecoming animal.  Often as punishment.  Rarely is it a positive experience in the West, to assume the form of an animal.  And crucially, it seems the human mind is kept even with the body not belonging to it.  This seems impossible.  That junco could not "know" running for running's sake.  But does the junco look back at me with its black eyes and cross over into me?  Do we exchange parts of ourselves and in doing so create some new form? 

Deep Ecology teaches that every life form has intrinsic value.  Intrinsic value.  And that it is also possible to identify with every life form.  Radical, isn't it?  It is a powerful experience to imagine yourself as another animal.  Or as a Wood's Rose.  Or as a mountain.  Or as Puget Sound.  It dissolves our inherent solipsism, vestiges of our selfish anthropocentric "guardianship" and "management" of the wild world, the world at all.  We are wild.  Our very language is wild.  We cannot contain it.  See       it          walking               away.

Forever

walking


away.

Like the preternatural glance of the Blue Heron, a breathing and perfectly alive hieroglyph on the creek bed.

Or like this visitor...

New scientific evidence suggests humans didn't evolve to run! Finally!

Seems humans didn't evolve to run after all, or at least not without modern western medicine and self-help groups.  According to Ignatz van Beaner, PhD of the University of Copenhagen at Albuquerque (Department of Continuing Education and Distance Learning), humans have evolved to run for short spurts sometimes lasting up to two weeks followed by recurring trips to the doctor or at the very least having to confront several new and strange pains that weren't present before the bouts of running began.  "It turns out there is strong evidence that humans and pain have coevolved", says van Beaner.  "Humans may have engaged in persistence hunting in our history, but surely these hunts were interspersed with long periods of hobbling around and general complaining at our lot in the food chain.  And we may have never actually succeeded in running anything down other than the occasional sloth."

In a recent study that isn't peer reviewed due to lack of interest but was nevertheless published in the Journal of Inter-Mountain Physiology and Kinetics, van Beaner found that one hundred percent of his subjects had some kind of pain after running and thought seriously of going to the doctor or taking pain medication.  And that's saying quite a bit because of the two in the study, one was actually a medical doctor and the other was van Beaner himself who, ironically, is called "Doctor" by students and colleagues.

"This is probably really a problem for the psychologists", van Beaner admits.  "Why would anyone want to subject themselves to this viscous cycle?"

In other news, espn.com used a T.S. Eliot reference this morning.  "Cruelest Month: Pujols' April empty of HRs".  Who ever said the polymaths at ESPN didn't read their classics?  April is the cruelest month, indeed.

Where the author shamefully recounts a moment in his life when he faced death and then had to go to the bathroom

Some folks who had stopped to watch me climb a rock which no one had ever thought of climbing because it wasn't worth it said, "You're pretty much free soloing now" which, as it turns out, could easily be my motto now.  I had gone far enough above the crash pad that a fall would've probably meant a helicopter coming in close and a dude getting lowered in a wire basket with a grim face and wearing flippers and the de rigueur red dry suit like they do on the Discovery Channel.  All I could think as my hands were starting to sweat and cramp and shake and my knees were becoming bitchy poltergeists was if there'd be a camera somehow, maybe in another helicopter nearby, and if I would give the "thumb's up" or not to the camera.

See, the problem is, I suck. I'm the guy that can make the kids section at the climbing gym seem epic.  I'm also after whatever publicity I can get.  I admit that.  I'm writing to no one about completely meaningless misadventures.  And hoping it will somehow be profitable enough someday that I can buy ripe bananas and gas and Nutella and Mara Natha Creamy All Natural No Stir Peanut Butter ("Batch roasted for great peanut taste") and Dave's Killer Bread and live out of my truck.  For astute readers of this blog, I'll be naming these names a lot in an attempt to secure free goods from them since my athletic abilities make the folks at Clif Bar, La Sportiva and even the good relativists loosely known as my "Circle of Friends and Family", cringe.  Y'all are totally welcome to donate still though.  I also enjoy Advil PM for obvious reasons.  No, really.  Though I'm totally open to Calms Forte as well.

Anyway.  The route, if you could call it that, started with a lie back that was easy enough.  But then my feet were there and my hands were here and all I could do was keep going.  So I did.  Doh!  I moved through the crux (which a real climber would think was just a nice place to stop and rest for a minute and maybe play a good game of self-thumb war), and found myself perched on crumbly precariousness twenty-five feet up.  Down climbing was out of the question since I'd tried that earlier and had come screaming off the rock like a body being plunged feet first into the water, you know like in the movies when the mob inevitably dumps the corpse in the river.  Then the words "you're pretty much free soloing now".  Then the realization that I was not Chris Sharma.  Panic. Then the realization that I'd been climbing again for about a week after a five year layoff. A bit more panic.  Then the realization that death was a possibility.  Extreme duress.  Then the realization that I might be featured on NatGeo in the fall.  Comforting.  Then the realization that this was where I found myself in life both literally and figuratively.  Exhale.  So I went up.  And twenty seconds later was walking down around the rock looking for the toilet paper.  Easy peasy.

Life is a series of acts.  What does Yvon Chouinard say (and how do you spell his name)?  Something like "real adventure is one in which you might not come back alive, and certainly come back different"?  That's about right.  (I'll also gladly accept stuff from Patagonia.  They have pretty colors).  Unless you've literally faced the fact that you might die or get hurt real bad any moment now because of what you've stupidly done and what you might do and most importantly what you're doing right fucking now (panic), life doesn't have the same visceral contrast.  I mean, when you're stressed out at work and people are freaking out and your world gets real small, once you've faced your own mortality, even if your mortality is faced on a laughably low rung on the ladder of difficulty, you have perspective.  Perspective and clarity.  Lightness and maybe even a smile grows across your face.  Perhaps no one will understand.  They might think you're nuts.  And you know what?  They'd be absolutely right.  Because you're an addict now.  And you're going to get there again.

Bear Poop and Bajadas

Under ripe bananas suck.  I know this, but peeling this particular banana's cardboard husk back I knew immediately it was going to really suck.  I still ate it.  I'm, among other things, a masochist.  And can somebody tell me why under ripe bananas taste like pennies?

 I arrived in Leavenworth early Friday morning, I mean really early.  But that is another story.  And, having no food other than a jar of Nutella, some peanut butter and a loaf of Dave's Killer Bread, I felt like I wanted something more.  Thus I found myself at Safeway with the swing-shift stockers stocking their unfresh bananas.  At least the sunrise was pleasant between the lifting clouds.

You get to Leavenworth a couple ways.  The most scenic is to take Highway 2 from Everett east over Stevens Pass.  The highway descends from the pass skirting the Chiwaukum Mountains and the northern flanks of the Stuart Range.  Eventually it joins the Wenatchee river and the two snake through the post-apocalyptic firescape of Tumwater Canyon.  In 1994, two fires burned more than 17,000 acres and threatened the town itself.  Nearly twenty years later much of the area still looks like a nuclear bomb had been detonated.  Husks of Ponderosa pine and Silver Fir stand rigid like days-old stubble way high up the sides of the mountains, eerily.  And the hills are covered in granite, or, more specifically, Paleozoic quartz diorite (yes, I cheated and looked it up to sound more fancy.  In fact, the rest of this paragraph is pretty much cribbed from several readily available online resources, so there).  You are constantly reminded here, maybe more acutely than other ranges I've spent time in, that you are standing on a gigantic rock.  The Cascades are a young range and young ranges are always more spectacular visually..  But the North Cascades in particular, the area that has as its southern boundary I-90, is even more resplendent because of Holocene glaciation, indeed there are more glaciers here than anywhere else in North America (Alaska excepted).  There are garage-sized black granite blocks hiding, literally, meters off the road.  Three thousand feet above are haunting towers overlooking vast talus slopes and here and there, the quickly retreating remains of glaciers.  It is an absurdly beautiful place. 

And, then there's the running.  There are several great trails that I've spent time on, but the landscape is so clear from the fires still that you can simply grab your shoes and just go with little fear of getting lost unless of course, concepts like rivers running downhill (and thus east in this canyon) or the fact that the sun tracts roughly east-west seem alien to you.  One morning I got up early and ran directly from my campground (Eightmile Campground) up a wash a couple thousand feet (I reckon).  Another morning I ran down Icicle Creek Road and explored all the little climber access trails which can be steep and technical.

As an unhappy-but-forever-working-on-leaving Seattleite, the weather in Leavenworth could not be more different, and more welcome.  It is dry, sunny, and warm for the months of the year that you'd expect it to be - roughly April through October.  The forests on the eastern slopes of the Cascades have a piney smell that I can't get enough of too.

So why bear poop and Bajadas?  Well, I cannot seem to go into the woods lately without intuiting the presence of Ursa or encountering it outright.  There was the "huckleberry incident" last summer when we surprised each other and he/she climbed up a tree fifteen feet away from me and we made eye contact.
This trip was no different.  I woke up one night tweeked out on Advil PM after a day of seriously thinking about getting a tattoo of Ursa Major, looked up and directly overhead, perfectly enclosed in a break in the trees, with the Lyrid Meteor shower arcing through it, was Ursa Major.  I can't tell you how powerful this was. And it simply spun on that spot in the sky throughout the night, never moving out of my line of sight. And then there was the morning while scrambling around that I heard what I thought was the familiar grunt (I remember from last summer) but I wasn't sure.  I felt something though.  A few moments later I came across fresh piles of bear poop.  Steaming.

I mention Bajadas because they provided adequate protection for my feet as I ran as fast as I could back to the car.  Not really.  Maybe.

The more I go into the wild, and off trail particularly, the more I am reminded how connected everything is.  I was not brought up this way.  I was not raised to view the natural world with awe and intimacy, like a lover.  So it has taken some time.  But, as the forays start to add up, and my legs get a little stronger, and the tendons and ligaments that once complained again take up the work they were made to do, and my brain starts to not recoil from inconvenience and change and discomfort, the more I become feral.  The more I live.  And, it's not quite happiness in the hour of vision, in the zero moment when the ego falls away, it's connection and love and vigor.

The Wild is a funny and unforgiving teacher.

Bear poop, real fresh.

A blue butterfly.  Duh.

Your standard Glacier Lily.

Me.  With Sun.

Trusty (and stylish) Montrail Bajadas.  Is anyone from Montrail reading this?  Wait.  No one is.

The Solace of Empty Voices

I woke up this morning malnourished, dehydrated, exhausted.  There were about six hundred times when I felt like finding an excuse to not go out the door for a run and another six hundred or so once I did to go right back to bed.  Life seems unbelievably difficult right now, for many reasons.  As I consciously forced myself to move forward, the world, as it always does, melted away and existence became merely the sound of my breath.  It was a profound relief.  I slowed way down (which is a revelation in itself) and found deep joy in it.

This is the very opposite of running from your problems.  I think that as runners, we can run into our problems.  I think the act of running itself is a kind of mindfulness that can be extraordinarily beneficial.  It is mindfulness after all which soothes an aching heart, an angry heart, a lost heart.  The voices of the world lose their timorous sound and merge with my own breath and the cadence of my legs and I become indistinguishable from anything else.  Running isn't a consolidation of self, it is a renunciation of it peacefully.  Running is solace.  Is protean.  Is restorative.  Is, with eating and drinking, a link home for us.  We're upright, beautiful, and have brains that are much too large for their own good.  Or at least mine is.  Life distilled is simple.  Joyful.  Uncertain.  Uncomfortable.  Perfect.  And as I carry around the world with me all clamoring in my head and heart I know that briefly, every day, I can run into the middle of it and let it wash over me.  And that I can do it tomorrow too.

Our bodies are wild.  Problem is, our brains are too.

You are my center when I spin away out of control...

I've been having this on-going conversation with a dear friend lately.  It runs something like this:

People have the spare time to go to the gym nowadays.  Stop and think about that.  People have the time in a day to go to a place (usually inside, always inside? but with really nice views of the city) to keep their bodies 'in shape'.  People have time also to get drunk.  People have time to stalk about and sell drugs, and to take them.  People have time to go to a baseball game.  Once a week.  Or to watch a movie.  It wasn't really that long ago that people had to work just to keep food on the table.  Much of the country still does. Seriously.  Either on a farm or in a factory or both, most hours of the day were and are devoted to staying alive.  Spare time?  Time enough to be a drunk?  Time enough to be 'healthy'?  There were drunks, obviously.  But of a different kind.  You just couldn't sit at a bar all evening every evening getting piss drunk.  Lack of bars, lack of money, lack of time.

My grandfather lived drunk for many, many years.  One day after he'd almost killed himself in a car crash he quit, cold turkey.  That was thirty years ago.  He's a farmer.  A link to the old days, so to speak.  You either live or you die.  It's a choice.  The modern world with all our spare time and extra money seems to create confusion about what's living and what's dying.  There's certainly more gray area now than there used to be, at least from my perch here, feet squarely in the modern world.  You can choose to be dead-in-life.  What does Thoreau say (not Thoreau again, you asshole)?  Something like "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"?  It's still true.  

What on earth does this have to do with running?  Well, while out on my daily this morning I was thinking about how lucky I am to have the hour (and more!) to do nothing but put one foot in front of the other in the morning.  The morning!  I don't have any chores.  I don't have to make sure the livestock are alive.  I don't have to punch in to some degrading and pointless job, at least until a little later!  Nope.  For a moment I can be free (free in the Gary Snyder sense of living happily with what's uncomfortable, mutable, protean, and spontaneous) and not pay any price other than the possible random injury.  I'm not going to go hungry.  I'm going to be able to pay my bills this month.  I have the totally unique choice to actually opt-out of working if I want to.  Unique in the whole of human history for the non-elites.  As just a lower middle class dude in this time and place I can just decide to live in my truck if I want to and run or climb or write or just sit there staring out the window with NO REAL CONSEQUENCE.  That's unique.  That's lucky.  Buddhists say how damn lucky it is to be born a human (considerably more fortunate than being born a fly) in a place that provides the liberties to perfect yourself.  Don't waste this opportunity.  Work less.  Live better.  Do something today and be thankful.  Or don't.  You have that choice.



In the spirit of reflection, check this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kCKob1YKOU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Say 'hi' to my little friend.

My little yellow foam roller is the perfect companion.  I roll all over it two or three times a day grunting in agony and selfish ecstasy and it never complains.  It does get a little depressed.  Who wouldn't?  After a thorough and sweaty 'session' my weight will have literally created a depression in it which takes a while to work itself out.  It's just a little too thick though for anything else.  Ahem.  Story of my life. Just kidding!

Seriously though, my little yellow foam roller has made it possible for me to run again  You see, I have a little something called ITBS.  ITBS stands for something, but really it stands for "I'm in This predicament Because of Stupidity".  Basically, late last year I thought it would be cool to run twenty-eight miles.  Problem was, I hadn't really run anything of any appreciable distance in a couple years.  In fact, my longest run EV-ER until then was, I think, thirteen miles and that was as a seventeen year old.  But I did it.  This was me afterwards...

I've been hobbled since.  Until, that is, a yellow foam torpedo and this weird thing called 'stretching' came into my life.

But why twenty-eight miles?  For me the answer gets complicated.  Distilled, and to borrow a phrase from someone eminently more qualified, "because it is there".  There's not always a Mount Everest near you but from the moment we're born there are twenty-eight miles in every direction around us waiting to be explored.  Or fifty.  Or a hundred.  Or three hundred and fifty.  Or one.  Doesn't matter.  As bi-pedals (am I saying that right?) we're pretty much obligated to walk and run around the areas surrounding us.


"Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see."  Do yourself a favor and go read this.  It's called "Walking" and you can find it in its entirety all over the internets.  Thoreau can be read for pith or wit or both.  He isn't really flowery (unlike his neighbor, the sometimes-impossible-to-understand Emerson who write things like "In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side") and most of him is a ridiculously fast read and contains lines throughout which will accumulate in your mind like molten lava...if molten lava could accumulate in your mind.  It's too hot but whatever.  The point is, the world that always surrounds us - always - is too vast to ever be explored thoroughly.  We are just as territorial as your common bear or marmot or something.  Stay in a landscape for long enough and you'll find this out.  I hope we all can find a landscape that resonates with us deeply.  That it becomes a language through which we both speak its beauty and ours.  Humans divorced of such a place are halved.  But it doesn't have to be like this!  Even if you live in the concrete jungle.  Though I rail against it sometimes, I have a deep connection to my little spot on the littorals of Puget Sound.  And when I leave, which I must for sanity someday, I will miss it.

Hey, it's sunny again today!  Oh my god!  Two days in a row!

Here's a parting shot of my little companion.  Go get yourself one if you want.  I'm going to roll on mine now.

Running With Scissors, Again.

In Seattle, except for the months of August and September when it's mostly nice, if it's sunny there's a manic energy to GET OUT!  GET SOMETHING DONE!  YEAH!  LET'S GO!  REI FIRST AND THEN, THE TRAILS!  or at least LET'S JUST DRIVE AND SIT IN TRAFFIC!!

Just kidding.  It isn't really that bad.  But it feels like it.  Today, the skies parted early, and though a north wind has been keeping temperatures cooler than it looks, it has been glorious.  We say sometimes, "if Seattle were like this more often we'd stay".  Or my favorite, "Seattle is like being in an abusive relationship.  Long stretches of neglect and downright torture interspersed with moments of sublimity."  I've been living here off and on for, jeez, seven years now.  I've been coming here for almost twenty-five.  There are so many things that make this place first-rate in terms of places to live if you're a trail runner.  Big mountains relatively close, rather mild winters, a strong community of like-minded weirdos, an REI every seventeen miles, a really good beer every three, and really, really good coffee every other block (and not Starbuck's either who, with no disrespect, brews coffee from charcoal).  Multitudes of restaurants, access to unusual and wonderful ingredients if you're the cooking type, and a general hippie-holier-than-thou mentality that actually works pretty well.  But goddamn the weather!  When a sunny day makes you verklempt with the thought of the coming week of overcast, you know shit's out of whack.  There's no sun here.  This is an example of hyperbole.  In coming blog posts you'll encounter a lot of hyperbole.   There's sun.  I'm sure there's someone out there who will parade out a sexy stat from some climate center somewhere touting our perfect balance of cloudcover and blue sky.  Good on ya.

For comparison Boulder gets 300 sunny days.  Seattle gets 60.  I know that's true cause I Googled it and Wiki answered.

Anyway, I ran some miles early this morning and then I drove The Truth out to Tiger and hiked up to T3.  Not all the way, but mostly.  When I got to 2300' I stopped to tie my shoe and my fingers wouldn't work.  Couldn't tell if it was from the air temps (low 30s and I was in a t-shirt) or from dehydration (had not had any liquid other than a cup o' coffee).  Then I tried to text and that was just funny-stupid.  Figured it was safer to turn around.  So I did.  2.5 hours.


Pretty little guy...

View on the mountain this morning...