Today, a winter storm masses itself through southern California
earlier, I was in Riverside, in the I.E. (inland empire)
having stayed over, after teaching an Inlandia Writers Workshop at the Riverside Library. Did not sleep well, bit of a sore throat and sinus infection, awoke to rain. Realization that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time wtih the wrong people. And so, I went to eat breakfast at a dowtown faux-alpine-village restaurant, Mr. T's.
Two friends I talked to in Riverside in the past 24 hours seem to be going more and more.....ignorant and inbred, if that is the best way I can phrase it, and with a smug, self-assurance that they are creating some kind of alternative genius. And this really frightens me - because isolationism, separatism, rebellion, lack of hope, and runaway mentalities are the earmarks of the loss of the human soul, the loss of renewal, the destruction of collectively sustenance-building society - that is, I'm witnessing firsthand that some people are just giving up, saying fuck it, things are fucked, therefore I'm going to say fuck it, too, and make it my business to just look out for #1. Lame excuses to be lazy, pathetic, and saddest, to abstain all responbility to oneself let alone the larger world, beyond perhaps one's one immediate posse. Yeah, that's gangster. Join a posse and do drive-by shootings if the world do you wrong.
Dangerous! Images of gun-wielding militia, rage against the machine, people thinking they can outsmart the unseen (and intangible) enemy. These are "times that try men's (and women's) souls," as the great U.S. Revolutionary War poet Thomas Paine said once, and may have said again of today - the weirdest, loneliest and scariest thing I see happening, emblemized by these particular people who will remain anonymous here, is that it appears that while the strong are searching for their deepest, innermost strengths and answering the call to build hope and renewal, the weak are retreating inward into fear-based paranoias, sick or ludicrous escape mechanisms that out-win even the most star-spangled and consumptive entertainment fantasies Americans have been locked onto with a particular vengeance since the early 90's: the "dumbing down" of our country, which has accelerated in the past two decades, actually three, I'd say. Did it sorta start when John Lennon got shot? In my lifetime, in my young adulthood, that was a definite dark-turning-point. 1980.
The rise of anti-intellectualism. I know from my years on the fireline that the fusees, the back-torching tools we often used to "fight fire with fire," always ended up in the hands of the most whacko, pyromaniac guys on the crew. Thinking of their own self-aggrandized sense of power, and enjoying some twisted walk between ignition and control. Clever, maniuplative, but not the smartest of men. Where, oh where is respect? This fascism-on-the-rise, by many of those who would think themselves enlightened and "better than the rest" is disappointing and chilling -not a far stretch from Aryan fantasies and imaginings of superiority, the thought that somehow we can out-run the fire. NOT. Try going on that fireline and you'll hear the race of train-engines, realize how puny you are. Holding a fusee and thinking you control the fucking world is about as lame and worthless and weak as shooting a musician who stands for peace, or thinking a gun or piece of nasty poetry aimed to hurt women and the weak will set you free.
We are in times of realizing our smallness in the bigger order of things, and we might with a little help from our friends understand that we are tiny fish in a giant phantasmogastic sea. But this is
not a hopeless or helpless thing. Rather, there is liberation here - jivamukti! Surrender to the nature gods, this massive storm poised to dump several more feet of snow in our mountains! Give in! But don't give up! Firefighting was the hardest thing I've ever done, besides being a parent and, arguably, editing a desert literature book - but - it was the ultimate experience in coming to know my strengths and vulnerabilities, of feeling good that I'd done some small measure of good to save homes, animals, forests - but meantime, understanding the futility of the job - fires will continue to erupt, and in the past few decades, in fact, forest fires have gotten bigger and more destructive than ever. But do I feel I wasted my work? Not for a moment. Rather, I saw and see it as a metaphor for the burning free of the human soul through our time spent on earth - as the writer Fitzgerald said, to loosely paraphrase, "the sign of a first-rate intelligence is to know that things are cracked and hopeless, and yet to keep up hope."
And so with this in mind, from a book I read in my early 20's and devoured then, and really comprehend through and through now, I lightly walk through apocalyptic fields. Into Clark's health food store downtown, and behold, a free chair massage! I buy healthy foods and share smiles and kind interactions with several people. I buy chamomile-lavendar tea, agave nectar, and three bottles of super green juice. Yeah, puny stuff. I could be planning survival tactics in a bunker, I could be making excuses for why working in the world is no longer important and make that my reason to sit on my ass all day and let someone else pay the rent, imagining that I'm some kind of exempted genius - but I don't.
And I manage to get home a few steps ahead of the darkness, through the San Gorgonio Pass, rain nipping at my taillights, and into full sunshine in the desert. I come home to the happy lapping dogs, not quite lap dogs, and read the story of Fig Tree John, an Indian who lived in the early part of the 20th century by the Salton Sea, how the Yuman Indians believed that the Salton Sea was the Colorado River's angry punishment at the white man for messing with the flow of the river for irrigation - Fig Tree John had so much respect for the power of the river that he stopped to pray - the lake created to be salty and useless, to irritate men for disrespecting the river gods. When I used to do whitewater rafting trips, it was common to lose a hat, or other item when going through rapids, or from a draft of wind, and we'd always say, "the river gods claimed it. Let it go." And so we did. And you know when going through rapids, you control nothing; you only can try to hold on and let the river hurl you along.
As for the hummingbird- somehow a green-breasted Costa's Hummingbird got into my house shortly after I got home. It bounced off the ceiling, landed on the floor, and my big dog briefly had it in its mouth. I believe the bird played dead for a moment. I spanked Brindle away, got a small broom and dustpan, and managed to get the bird outside.I began to cry, pained by my sense of distance from my two Riverside friends who seem to think that the thin pane of window glass is reality, pained by how this beautiful, brave bird has staved off a huge dog, and collapsed in a corner of the windowsill. I scoop the bird up so gently, and take it outside, thinking it is probably dead or almost dead, and cry, thinking of the sense of futile, trapped inside of a strange house I'm feeling these days - and set it on a table, wanting it to expire with dignity....
And then, the bird stirs, lifts up, and soars away, high, into the sky above the neighbor's house with incredible lightning speed and is gone, arcing quickly towards the sun..... to a "t."
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