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Goodbye Sweet Sedona

My sweet refuge

Sedona 2020

Goodbye to your vortices, your scrub oak. Your bittersweet manzanita hills, crimson woven to ash grey fingers, crowned in red berry and mini green leaf. Your krumholtz tree-spiked cliffs, gnarled and wizened… Goodbye to the winding trails that always give more than take. Goodbye to teacup, coffeepot, ship rock, snoopy rock, rabbit ears, chicken point, bell rock, cathedral, soldier pass, bikini rock, mitten, devil’s kitchen and devil’s bridge… and all the undiscovered devils waiting to be revealed in future rockfall. I have but to walk 100 feet for your faces to change.

Goodbye to the dune buggies and trucks with confederate flag-painted doors. Goodbye to the mostly out-of-towners in your restaurants, and out on your popular trails. Goodbye to your good residents trying to navigate a disappearing middle ground.

Goodbye to the expanse of time and space that makes all of this disappear. Goodbye to your secrets, your surprises, your unknowns. Your twisted vortecies, your roaming Javalina families, your high-country Elk and occasional predator sightings. Goodbye to the birds- the canyon wrens, the hummingbirds, the robins, the bluebirds, the western Jay’s. The owls, hawks, crows, and falcons that rule the sky.

Goodbye to your ruins, your caves. Goodbye to your bone-dry air and your Imperial sun. Goodbye to the threat of needles needlessly lining every path- the agaves, yuccas, prickly pears, your grasses and brush. Your junipers and sage, and the occasional baby-sat barrel cacti.

You have made me appreciate the stillness, the solitude, the peace found in the expanse of an alien landscape, living with a tenacity unfamiliar to the lush, rain-fed greens of the Northeast, or the Pacific Northwest, where I have spent my whole life. The minimalist beauty of the un-developed raw desert landscape. I have grown fond of your endless generous gifts of surprise and delight, just around this corner… just up over that rust-colored mound of wind and rain-sculpted wonder…

Here, where no human touch demands to be seen, out on your bridge to the unknown, I found my rhythm. I hit my groove. I caught my stride. I landed on your soft, age-crusted dirt, and began to live again in harmony with myself, which cannot happen without harmony with you.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

-E. Abbey

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Dreams and Quiet Voices #2

I have learned to listen to the songs in my head. They are my subconscious telling my conscious mind some truth about how I feel, at the most fundamental level. The song running around like a wild horse in the fields of my mind all night, in my dreams, was a cover of ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ originally by the Police, covered by Jacob Collier, aka, DJesse.

The song is such an enthusiastic and upbeat declaration of love, of the magic of feeling in love, or an expression of the muse, the experience of the muse in the life of an artist. For me, this has been the paradigm of what love is, since childhood. The poets speak of it (Rumi, Browning, Yeats, St. Cloud); musicians sing about it especially rock, in modern times. The idea of love or romantic love has been reinvented in living memory, through pop music and pop culture, fetishized, enshrined, pedestalized, and worshipped as we look for something to take our moral center in the absence of organized faith.

So love has become something of a mystic and holy state, in the minds of our poets and artists. And me, apparently. I take it as a good sign that I am moving past 2 years of heartbreak, the end of a long relationship and marriage, and the new awakening to the fact that all things are possible for me except the one I had committed to for the rest of my life. This happened against my will. But so be it, such things shape us, and, after many months of spinning in circles, eventually I got so much more out of doing the work to get here: clear on goals, strong and fit, and working on my passions and my own goals, both material and immaterial. I am loving my life right now.

So, even though this was in my head for a brief time, and it was a song that is in my rotations (meaning I listen to it semi-daily), it is still a sign that I am strong, and that possibilities are opening for me. I have come through my long dark winter of heartache. I am in touch with the joy of excitement about the world, and about amazing people I can meet. I am once again able to see the delight in getting to know another person, deeply. Like another song about this says, ‘I Will Survive‘ Halelujiah!

More from this series:
Dreams and Quiet Voices #1

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100 q’s: Think like Da Vinci

Good things from the 90’s #1

As part of an ongoing project to find good and useful information in books written before smartphones, social media, and the widespread internet, I’ve been reading an old book ‘How to think like Da Vinci‘ by Michael J. Gelb. Like the whole series, this one is a bit dated, first published in the 90’s. In other words, a different world, but perhaps one that we would do well to remember. In this other world, appropriately read from print on paper, we are reminded to be better and that we are responsible for our own experience of reality.

Da Vinci is held as a pinnacle example of enlightenment thought, the quintessential ‘Rennaisance man’ or homme de Renaissance. Interestingly enough, Da Vinci was a secular, non-partisan intellectual, and was just as happy offering his services to brutal militant leaders like the Medici’s, as to the Church, or even foreign nobles from France, considered enemies of his home cities in Italy. For this reason, perhaps, his works were less finished, and less acclaimed in his lifetime, though he was recognized in his day.

I just completed his first principal: Curiosita: the idea that we can understand and learn by asking questions, even if we do not have the answers right away. This exercise consisted of writing down 100 questions, all in one sitting. Whatever pops into your head. Of course some of them will be mundane, or even funny. “How much longer do I have to do this’ is a perfectly good question to write down. In fact, the first 20 questions tend to be obvious, and therefore not the most profound. The middle section of 21-80 yields some gems, and themes emerge. And then, 81-100 can get deep, and tend to be the most soul-searching.

After the 100 questions, the exercise tells us to pick our top 10. Pick based on themes, but the key is to get down quickly to what matters most. These then are recorded and become a resource to remind you of what you are most interested in, and keep your mind engaged.

The exercise goes on, and the practice of writing down questions turns to a large physical phenomenon, such as ‘birds in flight’ or ‘the body’ or other rennaissance themes, then you choose your own. Then you journal in a day about a theme, noticing things related to that theme, for example: my body in contact with the physical/material world.

I do not believe that there is an App for everything. I think certain things are antithetical to the experience of working with your smartphone. Meditation is one (and yes, there are good meditation apps but I question if the user actually gets the same benefit through an app as through a retreat), and these longer-view intellectual exercises are another. So, in the spirit of transparency and authentic discovery, here are 10 best questions taken from my 100:

‘What will happen if I allow my mind to fully come into it’s own (not just turn it off)?’

‘How much joy is it possible to fit into the life that remains for me?’

‘What can I get rid of in my life to be more successful, full of joy, and fulfilled?’

‘How can I write a book as good as “The Overstory” by Richard Powers?’

‘Will Humanity survive the next 100 years? The next 1000?’

‘What are the things on my death bed, that I look back on to say I have lived a full and good life, and touched greatness?’

‘How do I experience the nature of all reality, that it is all impermanent?’

‘How can I stay connected to the highest truth, even in a chaotic life?’

‘What does everyone else know for certain that I know isn’t true?’

‘What cause outside of myself can I willingly give my efforts to, without resentment or reservation?’

‘What are the mythologies for older men that remain open for me?”What does it mean to age?’

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Dreams and Quiet Voices #1

Spending a lot of time alone with oneself does strange things to one’s mind. Not bad, don’t get me wrong, but things that you might not want to talk about in public. So of course I run to my blog to talk about it, because it’s so private…

I am convinced my subconscious, my intuition, my quiet voice speaks to me through the songs that get stuck in my head. Not all for the same reasons, and not all in the same way. But for example, if a song is in my head while I am asleep, and I dream the lyrics over and over and over, as happened yesterday, it is significant.

One song that stuck on repeat in my unconscious mind – that vast, fathomless multitude of self that processes 80% of the information I absorb daily, and tries to make sense of it nightly – was ‘Apple Tree’ by Erika Badu. It’s significant that this is a song on a playlist that I listen to, so it did not come from deep within me, as some songs do that I haven’t heard in years… but it wanted, and got, a moment of its own, to make its point.

The lyrics ‘I work on pleasing me ’cause I can’t please you…/ and that’s why I do what I do’ and ‘I don’t waste my time trying to get what you got,/ and I don’t mess around tryin’ to be what I’m not’ are exactly why this song hijacked the feedback mechanism between my conscious and unconscious mind, for a few hours in the early morning.

I’ve been working on myself, developing my creative expression, and asking myself what I want to be and do, and who I want to be daily for the last 5 weeks. The questions are part of a project, a program, if you will, that I built around my day, to give my free time structure and myself some direction and discipline. It’s difficult to structure time and spend it well, when there is nothing external to peg to. No schedule, no commitments to other co-workers. My priorities, my goals, my time is entirely my own. That has been a problem this year as we all deal with social isolation and the pandemic. It has been a fruitful time of introspection at long last.

My subconscious was having a party. The party had a one-song soundtrack. And Erika was the guest of honor, because she wrote a song that is just TRUE for me right now. I am just being me, not anyone else, and I can’t be bothered to care what anyone thinks about it because I am LOVING it! My life is full of the things I love, all day long. Not just in a short term satisfaction way, but the long term, important not urgent things that help me progress towards my life long goals – Creative Writing, brainstorming for business, talking to friends, and good, comprehensive physical health goals. Exercise, diet, and clean living.

When my unconscious sings to me, I listen. My muse, my guide, my self is talking to the tiny part of the multitude I am that is called my conscious mind. All of my daily meditation, all of my journaling, and my exercises to face the tough questions in myself; all of it together helps my conscious mind shut up and listen, and choose to be quiet. This is the way to pursue that elusive Jungian goal of total integration of self. My practices are my chariot, diverse forces harnessed to pull me towards the goal of self-knowledge. It is a bonus that I know myself enough to recognize the message in the music. Party on!