settling on any fetid pile of warm shit
and content with my short life in the damp shade
all the while striving for the sun.
All mystical and scientific revelation indicate I should not only be content, but awe struck and inspired by my role in this menagerie
after all, the largest most infiltratingly expansive organism is a network of subterranean fungus.
:
I needed a Winter. Inseperably, the climate and my inner world needed to cool off, take a long dark respite from the tussling summers ad springs. Resting in the dark brings vivid, lucid dreams. I've known, but not yet fully incorporated the taoist wisdom of harmonizing with nature; her cycles and phases are forces of wind while we, these fragile paper leaves, frip and flutter. Winter is a part of summer, the system is the outbreath and in-breath of life. This time to heal, to digest and to reconstitute is paramount importance. I needed a Winter.
This year was a success, despite my early concerns that it might otherwise have been a mistake. I did listen to the Great Spirit, as Jonah listened to the Hebrew God, going where it was least desirable for I/him to go.
The clues are in my journals and this 'returning' is the step I've been putting off in my continual transformation. The mists of my growing discomfort with the life of vagrancy I was living had accumulated into haunting forms. My guilty conscience, in disobeying my inner voice, chased me like ghosts across the lands. However, there were guides.
The deep fire-lit night of a silent mountain revelation put me face to face with the simple commands of the Great Spirit. A wise and eloquent Iranian soothsayer gave me keys of my personality from within the Book of Changes: I travel onward, never settling, because I want to be sure I am on the right road. This contrasting and cross checking is essential to my conviction. Doubting Thomas. My Sino-Zodiac birthright is the skinner: I am an eternal skin-shedder making transformation my goal, welcoming the pain. Yes, it's fooey. Yes, it is how I make my decisions. Or rather, it is how I find the hidden desires within my own subconscious. The patterns we see in the chaotic ink reveal our deepest direction and desire. This is how fortune telling and mysticism works, after all, as a mirror unto oneself.
So, Winter and its sterilizing cold was a baptism. I am back in the bosom of Earth's cycles and have earned a fresh rebirth. I find it peculiar that from this point I am drawn back to Japan. Radiated Japan. It is as if there is something about America that longs for a bridgeland, one that can softly link me back to Asian society. From Japan, will I again dream of India? From India, again dream of the West? As the globe rotates, perhaps I will be its fleshling satellite.
I was insane. That is something not everyone has in common. I mean clinical. Just, no one knows because I was not erratic, violent or out of control. I can see this now as I have sidled up to the sane for long enough to feel grounded among them.. sanity in respect to its coherence to cultural norms, that is, puts the former vessel 'I' in the markedly insane. I had a contempt for the phony playacting socialites, I had a disdain for the fruitless and overlycomplicating technological vortex, I had a physical unease when in manmade surroundings like malls or in cars or on highways or in movie theatres. Truly, I was Earth's innocent child, closer to her then than ever before. I went to her so I could see with her eyes, feel with her many limbs the condition I and I were in. I was insane then and incapable of connecting with the majority of people. I feel as if that insanity, the clear cutting light of it, is my treasure and I begrudgingly give it slowly away so that I can live among men and women less inclined to mystical abandon.
Out of touch, but extremely eloquent. I re-read my often scribbled, sometimes calm journals. I was coherent and inspecting. I was vitalized, emotionally bright and potent in my life and spirit. My life was invigorated by my being a pariah; my break with America was one of healing. Now, back in her bosom, there is a lingering guilt. I am selling little pieces of my treasure. I have to go away again, if only to know that the road I am on is the right road...you see the endless cycle this leads? The countless indecisions? But, I know that the wheel turns, and to stay out from under it, so must I.
Rolling Clearwater.
