I cannot say the fever has broken.
Today is another bright, cloudless day and a start, in earnest, to the ‘new year,’ both S’hanah Tovah on the Jewish Calendar and a start to the post-Labor Day scholastic year in the United States, though many begin as early as mid-August in the South and central states. It’s symbolism. Perhaps we in the USA are irrevocably aligned with the Jewish State?? Maybe it’s simply a random part of a cycle in every day American life, modernity and monotony, as predictable as spring training, the Oscars and advent of (American:) football season again.
Side note: I know. ‘Futbol,’ in my mind, equals ‘soccer.’ ‘Football’ in the US means NFL. I honor You and, thus, I will honor your passion using this slight equivocation. My nephew knew about that player who left UK. LOL. What’s his name?
You wrote now that he departed UK no need live in London. Live with me.
Actually, I can’t lie. The latest path I’m on has been takin’ me into rabbit holes on Twitter with activism and beautiful comrades #StraightOuttaLondon.
Marxism. Socialism. Progressive causes for a better today instead of waiting for tomorrow. The moral stand against imperialism, at the least taking into account realities of how this modern world has evolved, the billions of stories and points of view all existing and colliding, a wondrous thing of beauty, come into view, framed in relief against a backdrop of all I bought and was sold, all the unseemly, simply trite valences of facts, perceptions, myth, wrong and right with which I was raised, the means of and manner in how I sought, chose, was trained to participate in my own life, family, community and society all, in a quietly accommodating, passive state only now in nearly 2022 are shaken from a narcoleptic, somnambulist’s slumber into a waking rage.
Ties that bind may be somewhat restrictive and yet also a means by which to not lose each other, our selves in the deluge, a storm from all sides. I am unsure if the analogy I draw now has any deeper meaning than one painted inside clichéd lines of metaphor. The renewal of seasons and constant cycles of life and death, change and the personal passages entwined within the endless passing of each (Gregorian, Julian, Vedic and my new favorite, I’m serious, The Zoroastrian) calendar year. It’s all too beautiful. To rest my eyes in shades of green. We’ll touch the sky!
The harvest bounty of Summer’s end, a season mellowing, yielding in streaks of gold and purple and red now turning to Autumm leaves me in the fall — or at least a slow arcing crawl of Apollo’s southbound call, the thundering hooves of his mighty steeds galloping apace, loyal beasts heeding their master’s mighty command, tireless in never-ending race across the firmament that for the gods is always day even when we here are bequeathed the respite of night. Look how his chariot, a bit softer and lower here, grows fiery hot as he approaches New Zealand, Australias, The isles of The Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, how His Light breathes A Summer Breeze upon Antartica’s Great seventh continental, majestic place.
Back here at home, I reap what I have sown. Have I done right by the seeds in Spring, paying proper heed to The Mother Moon and Father Sun as they continue to travel, watch over every tide, each continent, every sea and their lonely isles, o’er mountain peaks and along dirt roads, over slums and mansions, cities and suburban homes, villages along canyon passages, through every brook and dale, river and valley stream?
Have I soldiered strong and true, with aim and heart aligned, on the right path? Who is to decide and deem it so?
These are the questions that bedevil me, our collective interconnectedness never more extreme than here, now in this endless waking dream, even as endemic isolation recedes it grows, accompanied by a nearly complete lack of integrated means to honor Our Mother, to properly remain attached to Her and give back what we deplete.
These all do cause me great consternation. In a way that is profound, without tears, I weep. I stand alone at this great divide in time, yours and mostly mine, bear sad witness even as I stoically attempt to embrace it all, accepting even if not resting, seeing what is right and wondering: Do I have what it takes here in the waning days of my endless Summer and Spring, long since gone, to harvest an Autumn crop and take it into Winter, perhaps to even right what was wrong?
Persephone and I met in that precarious time between seasons and my heart won out over reason when she shone her sisterly, maternal, loverly light on me, the same one now I seek from You when I may need to simply be aware of the (I think unlikely) possibility I’m a lonely man, alone in a room. Why would you be the answer, the ever-present Fed Ex package that saves my life here on my cast away island? I don’t think about reality, the potential for micro-aggressions that bump up between husband and wife — and, yeah, that’s in my head and I cannot say why — over money, religion, what to eat and how your patterns of sleep disrupt mine, where to go and what to do today, now to be available and ready for affection and romance despite my mood or your distracted behaviors buried in a device from early morning until afternoon, only breaking to see what’s new on some other form of more intriguing place adrift from reality.
Mine is planted right here. 9-5. 24/7.
I listen now in the glow of a brightly sunlit room to the outside world, a cranky, moody crone flying in on her broom, way too early to be in the hallway outside my apartment door and speaking in a voice better suited for beyond the confines of a building, zero awareness that others live here when she’s banging pots and pans, creaking across one spot on my ceiling, hovering on or clomping along her floor doing god knows what, starting laundry late at night or in the early morn and slamming drawers and doors as she goes along.
She’s not nearly as bad as what I knew in growing up and that’s where my mind keeps bending back to wanting to talk with You, to know all the whys and wherefores and whens of who You were, for me ready to abandon all I ever knew before and be in Your world. Why, I cannot say and I question if, indeed, as I resist the urge to glance your way and see what You wrote today. I simply prefer any level of distraction from my life in solitude. To be sure.
I also love my life in solitude. To be sure.
I also hate that feeling I’m missing out and, regardless of a childhood often left behind, I feel a certain sadness I cannot be part of Your life. I can’t say why. I really would love it and Babe, it ain’t no lie.
It’s not clear to me.
Yesterday, I felt so impassioned and impatient, trouble in mind as to how I could reach you. What was I going to do? How am I supposed to live without you now that I’ve been loving you (if for not) so long??? It’s clear to me that I have some misplaced anxiety turned idolatry and, back to what I attempted to right through words rapidly typed yesterday — I want it all in the Western Ideal way. Beauty, brains, romance, intimacy and the daily moribund grind of life’s banalities, the ways in which those — from what I read — in Eastern traditions never shed a distracted sovereign glance at their spouse but save for the ideal love of goddesses and gods outside the house.
A different kind of romance. My religion is Love. My politics are Peace. Your altar, your platform, Ms. El Aasar. If you please.
I think, in part, I harken back to times of my youth, too fearful of parental retribution for loving women whom I already knew on instinct they’d never accept and, beyond that, would foment if not direct then by subversive means any level of xenophobic extremes — and by stating ‘xenophobic’ I’m choosing diplomacy and also, likely disowning my ingrained, learned and practiced apathy, my somnabulist’s indifference instead of embracing the keynote, the core of my being and standing up for the one true thing. Love.
The high I most enjoy and am inclined to imbibe is a touch, a look, a whisper and a moan in the the fulcrum, entwined bodies, legs wrapping in python and prey’s passionate, hungry squeeze, feet locking behind knees, limbs tight, fingers press in between each eve, the ribs born of woman, born of man if I were Adam and You, Eve, together again in The Garden, levitating beyond a dream into the excess of surrender, consummation and conception, conceiving as one a Communion with God, Goddess, the gods — Mine is in You. My Goddess is You and I am Yours, the whole point of humanity is, as Jesus said, to be perfect just as God in Heaven is perfect. It doesn’t matter if he is White or Yellow, Brown or Black, wears a cloak with a grandfather’s beard, an Incan Woman on her throne or a Fiery Sun God racing across the skies in their horse-drawn chariot.
The gods prevail within us and I trust that, though You may only be a Muse, some part of me wants to believe that You’d feel it, too, that I am only a boy who loves a girl and the ages of our vessels are no match for The Truth, that waking together as I have been roused by You, we see clear eyed through and through our windows past the folly and frolic of grasshopper youth, beyond the preparations of ant’s labor something much more profound than what to eat or what to wear. We see each other, a little less lonely, a little more connected and better prepared to live in whichever reality is in store here, on the next plane of being or transformed into something else or nothing if it all ends right here.
This is what I believe. These truths I hold to be self evident. That I love you and no love will do other than the love I have within, the forgiveness and the relinquishing of shame and sin, to harbor a deeper conscious awakening, an acceptance of the reckoning we have as humans with our home and each neighbor with whom we share this time, this space, no matter kin, friends, colleague, young or old. This is what J. Krishnamurti called The First and Last Freedom. This is the essence of what Ram Dass preached and Joseph of Arimathea then quoted, as my knowledge of books and film recalls, from Judaic Scripture. Love thy god with all your heart and all your soul. Y
ou are my god as is each person to whom I ascribe the compassion of what Jesus next prompts: Love thy Neighbor. We each should and could transform our petty place with this simple bending of the light, with this simple twist of fate.
Bibliography
Association Football
American Football
The Zoroastrian Calendar
Aesopp’s Fables
The First and Last Freedom, J. Krishnamurti
The Atrocity of Love, Soundtrack
