Grandfather

While walking in the desert I remembered my grandfather. He had come to the US a recent engineering graduate from Kiev, met my grandmother, a grocer's daughter, who later would give birth to my mother; worked as a metallurgist in the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Columbus, and was ill with diabetes and marrow cancer for the time I knew him, dying when I was twelve.

When I was about seven, my little brother and young parents took rail to Columbus from Pittsburgh, a great thrill. 

He spoke to me always with respect, answering my questions about lightning, the workings of television, government and geography, dinosaurs and much more that I don't recall. On Sundays in Columbus we'd sometimes watch the Yankee games on his 1950's seven inch cabinet TV.

Once he gave me a lesson in chemistry titration by taking me to the bathroom and having me hold a test tube, partly filled with the urine I had watched him void into it, adding reagent drop by drop until the color change told him how high his sugar level was. I remember how warm the test tube felt in my hands, and my queasiness, not quite dispelled by his gentle manner. I watched him, propped up in a hospital bed, inject his belly and thighs with insulin; I can still recall his ashen face, the smell of the alcohol swabs in his bedroom, the metallic gleam off the autoclavable syringes.

He was a short, compact man, made more sturdy looking by the steel and leather brace he wore against the ongoing deterioration of his spine. His complexion made sallow by illness. Bald, with soft gray almond eyes. A very neat grey mustache, a few coarse black hairs marking it. I never heard him raise his voice; in fact, he spoke in quiet tones that nonetheless commanded my attention. Something also that made an impression that wouldn't have been obvious to me as a child, only remembered all these years later: a calm resignation, and the strength of that.

I stopped for a moment to look out across the desert toward the western hills. The sky above them purpling and golden this late in the afternoon. Venus could be seen sailing above the horizon, a brightening light in the deep blue. I heard myself say, grandfather, how do you like the desert we live in now? He smiled with my face, looked toward the mountains through my eyes. Suffused by gratitude, I felt the stillness of the day, the gift of contact.

DESIRE

Lately, I've been noticing a vague, undifferentiated desire. Not hunger, but something like it; if I go for something, say a bit of chocolate or some tea, it isn't satisfied. I know what real hunger is like, and real satiation, a quiet hum in the body after some good food. This isn't like that.

Sometimes, I linger with it, and the first thing that peels away is any need to satisfy its demand, which has been amorphous anyway. Stripped of that, it hovers in consciousness, resolving itself into my breathing, or a fullness in my throat, or some other bodily sense; or a thought, or something someone is saying to me; some experience, the desire disappearing in the process. A ghost or a vapor barely perceptible, resolving into the next thing.

It's always disappearing, always not quite there, hinting at some quiet emptiness that is somehow alive. Something like being at an event horizon, feeling the pull toward . . . nothing. The pull itself is the the only movement; the destination is the next thing I'm involved in. Try to focus on it and it disappears into the looking; try to move it around or change it or identify it and it disappears into the effort.

I could say that I disappear and reappear, going in and out of the everyday world of thoughts and things in an endlessly repeating cycle, but how strange to contemplate the in-between, when I am not there, you are not there, but life is!

PLANES

Coming out of work the other day, I saw two fighter planes in tandem banking sharply toward the Air Force base to the south. In the next moment, I shuddered, thinking, there are the killing machines.

Taking the experience apart, what strikes me is the progression from mere perception to the series of reactive thoughts, as if my mind had the capacity for pure perceiving, followed immediately, but not simultaneously, by associative thought, with its own train of emotional reactivity.

It's not significant, I don't think, whether the associations are deemed positive, (Wow! What a wondrous event! Such amazing flying machines!), or negative, (What awful mechanisms of murder!). The point is that they are added on to the raw experience, as if each moment of seeing carries with it a bag that immediately opens, spilling out a chain of reactions, often contradictory, within a system that makes judgements on value. And may follow that with an entire, justified, philosophy.

What would the world be like were the raw experience be given enough space to be just as it is, without pondering or manipulation of the content? A way of being receptive to what is, whether it be the world's objects or one's own streaming thoughts? What penetration into the mystery of these manifestations would be available? When this happens, as it sometimes does, there's a sense of revelation and wonder, perhaps a simple joy at being alive, with little or no separation from the experience. Things appear within a whole, blessed by presence.

FOLLOWING THE RED GOD, FOLLOWING WATER

"This is the moon and stars," he said, "and also these, this chair, this flesh. There is nothing that really separates them from each other, or from any other thing.

"The attention follows thoughts as one would follow a path of stones laid by rivulets from recent rains, leading down toward a wash and west up the hillside.

"Then a thicket of low lying acacia and a hooked barrel cactus on its darker sand shimmering in the muted light, still taking water from last week's rain.

"The path follows stones out of the thicket up toward a nearby ridge, the desert view opening toward the sun setting, a low bar of cloud hanging above it, its underside billowing up pink from orange fire.

"A snapshot opportunity, and a stunning artifact in the resulting photo: A violent slash of red light in the picture's center, angled about thirty degrees from the horizontal, as if the sun's fire had opened a portal within the water and earth. A glowing red bubble on the desert floor seems to spill liquid gold to the ground."

In the cooling late afternoon in Tucson, I could not but notice glowing Venus at twilight. It got me thinking and making tie-ins to my own experience.

The next day, again in late afternoon, when the sun is so mild and the light clarifies everything and paints a gold tint on it, I hacked out some weedy flower stalks under a palm in my yard and later sat on D's flat concrete stoop while she sorted and photographed some of the gem stone jewelry she'd made.

Coming back to my place, I wrote some of what I had been thinking about; here it is.

Venus

Feel the desire of the plant to produce flower and seed. Try to name that feeling and the experience jumps a gap. Feeling is closer to being, seeming to emanate in a clear ray from source. Perhaps it is an older, more refined tool in the racial memory.

In the mode of apprehension taken in feeling, one senses the underlying stillness penetrating experience more completely. One feels beckoned into the fathomless undefined.

It is fertile ground—possibly the most fertile; the root of thought has not been pulled out, shoots come soon. One names and categorizes experience amongst innumerable choices, making stories.

Or one may analyze experience, which amounts to sending a light into a dark well, reflections from the dark bottom, as in a mirror, picturing earlier experiences. These may be ignored as desired. If one desires to penetrate deeply this way, the primordial image in the light itself makes itself known. Here is the true archetype, a creative power center, programmed by interstellar forces.

In this light one may live, still, either angelic or demonic existences; the duality still holds, though less obdurately and with greater clarity of choices.

Feel the plant progressing from shoot to flower to seed, all in a glance, and notice how that process is a function of, and of the substance of, mind. Reflect on the impersonality combined with great beauty and vibrancy . Be quiet often. It is like sipping thirsty from a very deep stream.

On the Road and Back

He revels in the sight of the median strip disappearing endlessly beneath the front edge of the hood as he drives the interstate. A sinuous gray presence disappearing but not changing, as when he'd first driven his father's black Pontiac southward through a soggy afternoon on the first family trip to Miami. The burned hydrocarbon reek of the rusted rattling 80's Dodge pickup just ahead. He notices a long narrow roadside puddle and remembers it had rained the last time he'd ridden to Phoenix. Cottony clouds above now march in stately formation toward the western horizon. A roadside pistachio grove momentarily hides the distant line of ragged mountains.

Skinny black ants scurry across the concrete walkway leading to the rest stop bathrooms; he steps carefully across their path toward the structures ahead. An Indian woman sits in the shade of the pillared highway map silver bracelets and earrings spread before her on black velvet cloth. A long sigh escapes someone from an adjacent cubicle; water dripping somewhere reminds him that he's in the desert.

Back on the road he feels that he's on the brink--or perhaps past it--of an awareness that encompasses all possibilities, that brokers no harsh questioning judgments about anything, because all is laid out evenly, seen for what it is and loved, with something that seems almost to be a choice being given as to what will happen, but a choice made by that un-nameable agency that presides over the whole of it with love and can not in any way be imagined to make a mistake. To name that agency causes its immediate disappearance, and an acute sense of loss, unless it be named: himself.

Something seems to radiate from the region of his chest, not the hard bony abutment he could (and occasionally does) thump with his fist but an insubstantial felt presence that evades his attempts to focus on it, invites, in fact, his attention to become itself, at which time an opening to a non distinguishable objectless expanse most like a whispering at dusk occurs. Suffused with a feeling of the completion of desire. The sun lays a blazing white patch across the near half of the empty passenger seat beside him without however defeating his air conditioner.

*****

Back in his office he feels his identity slipping away from him, between his breaths, before each breath, after. A rushing like the movement of fast water. The breath is carried in it, carried again into the always appearing. It is as if there is absolutely nothing, always appearing. A finger seeks an itching spot beside his nose. A woman with shining black hair passes in the hallway outside his room.